The bed in which the confinement is to take place should be scrupulously clean, and in order to insure this, it should be made a rule that the bedstead be taken apart, and taken out-of-doors where it is thoroughly washed and afterwards exposed to the purifying influence of the sun and air. The mattress must also be taken out for a similar dusting and cleaning, and kept for a time exposed to sun and air. The confinement chamber should go through the same renovating ordeal; the carpet of this particular chamber should be taken up, the floor thoroughly scrubbed and the walls and ceiling washed off and whitened. It will be better if a few clean mats or rugs can be substituted, and the old carpet not relaid until after the confinement, when the woman is up and around again. These precautions will guard against the possibility of infection and the dangers of childbed fever, and the many different phases of inflammation which are the result of carelessness in the details of cleanliness. Of course, the nurse and attending physician must be equally anxious of their own personal cleanliness. If he or she leave any of the infectious diseases, like scarlet fever, measles, typhoid fever, erysipelas and puerperal fever, either of them is quite sure to communicate the contagion to the innocently ignorant lying-in woman, and entail upon her endless suffering and death. In France and Germany, stringent precautions for nurse and physician against the dangers of infections are mandatory under the laws, but in free America such legal injunctions would be considered as curtailing our liberty; in the meantime, innocent lives are sacrificed, through lack of systematized regulations, at the cost of liberty degenerating into license. On the day of confinement the bed is held in readiness for the occasion, by spreading over the mattress a large piece of oiled cloth, or what is preferable, rubber cloth; this must reach up high enough so as to afford proper protection and lap over the side of mattress and bedstead. Beside the bed an extra mat should be laid, to catch any fluid that may run down the rubber cloth on the floor.