I find myself totally ignorant of my own child's necessities. I cannot
even provide her food. O Doctor! can't something be done for young
women to prepare them for motherhood?"

MOTHERCRAFT PREPARATION

The time will come when our high and normal schools will provide
adequate courses for the preparation of the young woman for her
highest profession, motherhood. This young mother, who had reached the
goal of Bachelor of Arts, found to her sorrow that she was entirely
deficient in her education and training regarding the duties and
responsibilities of a mother. In every school of the higher branches
of education that train young women in their late teens there should
be a chair of mothercraft, providing practical lectures on baby
hygiene, dress, bathing, and the general care of infants, and giving
instruction in the rudiments of simple bottle-feeding, together with
the caloric values of milk, gruels, and other ingredients which enter
into the preparation of a baby's food.

Young women would most enthusiastically enroll for such classes, and
as years passed and marriage came and children to the home, imagine
the gratitude that would flood the souls of the young mothers who were
fortunate enough to have attended schools where the chairs of
motherhood prepared them for these new duties and responsibilities.

EARLY MEDICAL SUPERVISION

Just as soon as it is known that a baby is coming into the home, the
expectant mother should engage the best doctor she can afford. She
should make frequent calls at his office and intelligently carry out
the instruction concerning water drinking, exercise, diet, etc.
Twenty-four hour specimens of urine should be frequently saved and
taken to the physician for examination. In these days the
blood-pressure is closely observed, together with approaching
headaches and other evidences of possible kidney complications. The
early recognition of these dangers is accompanied by the immediate
employment of appropriate sweating procedures and other measures
designed to promote the elimination of body poisons. Thus science is
able effectively to stay the progress of the high blood-pressure of
former days, and which was so often followed by eclampsia--uremic
poisoning.

In these days of careful urine analysis, expertly administered
anaesthetics, and up-to-date hospital confinements, the average
intelligent woman may enter into pregnancy quite free from the oldtime
fears, whose only rewards wer