American women in education and enlightenment, in freedom and progress, are the peers of the best and noblest of their sex. From individual, social and national interests, they ought to be conversant with all that pertains to this subject, so closely allied to the interests of the race. We find in women of superior education and marked intelligence an exaggerated development of the emotional nature, and a corresponding deterioration of physical powers. Weakness, debility, and suffering is the common lot of most of them. Not one in a hundred has health and strength to pursue any chosen study, or to follow any lucrative occupation, and what is vastly worse, most are unfitted for the duties and perils of maternity. Dr. Gaillard Thomas says: “Neither appreciation of, nor desire for, physical excellence sufficiently exists among refined women of our day. Our young women are too willing to be delicate, fragile and incapable of endurance. They dread above all things the glow and hue of health, the rotundity and beauty of muscularity, the comely shapes which the great masters gave to the Venus de Medici and Venus de Milo. All these attributes are viewed as coarse and unladylike, and she is regarded as most to be envied whose complexion wears the livery of disease, whose muscular development is beyond the suspicion of _embonpoint_, and whose waist can almost be spanned by her own hands. “As a result, how often do we see our matrons dreading the process of child-bearing, as if it were an abnormal and destructive one; fatigued and exhausted by a short walk, or ordinary household cares; choosing houses with special reference to freedom from one extra flight of stairs, and commonly debarred the one great maternal privilege of nourishing their own offspring. These are they who furnish employment for the gynecologist, and who fill our homes with invalids and sufferers.” Understanding and following physiological laws, pregnancy _ought_ to be as free from pathological symptoms, and parturition as void of suffering with American women as with any on earth, or even with the lower animals. Dr. Dewees says: “_Pain in childbirth is a morbid symptom_; it is a perversion of nature caused by modes of living not consistent with the most healthy condition of the system, and a regimen which would insure a completely healthy condition might be counted on with certainty to do away with such pain.” The great English scientist, Professor Huxley, says: “We are indeed, fully prepared to believe that the bearing of children may and _ought_ to become as free from danger and long debility to the civilized woman as it is to the savage.” The following paragraphs from one of the essays in Dr. Montgomery’s classical work on Pregnancy, give practical details of cases in illustration of the belief in painless parturition. “In a letter to me Dr. Douglas states that he was called about 6 A. M., Sept. 26, 1828, to attend a Mrs. D., residing on Eccles St.