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York City. Actually people saw a doctor for the first time a week or so before their confinement. It was the first time they ever had seen a doctor, if they saw him then. It was much more likely that the doctor of a hospital clinic was sent for just at the last minute, just as the woman had gone into labor. There was no preliminary knowledge of what the case should be. All kinds of kidney complications and all sorts of things would have developed. Those were the great causes of maternal deaths.

They thought that any doctor who had been through a medical school probably had scrubbed up and you wouldn't have such losses from puerperal fever as you had in the days of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. But there were still these very high death rates, which were much higher than any other country. Therefore they thought something ought to be done.

They wanted to organize a committee. It has been the most successful piece of social work I have ever seen organized. It was perfectly remarkable. They utilized as the basis of their membership an entirely new group who had never before been asked for money or for social action of any kind. These were the patients of the principal obstetricians of New York. They were young mothers who had just been having their babies under the care of first class obstetricians, or were still in the process of having their babies. They knew