The decade just past (1917-1927) has been marked by an intensive drive to establish prenatal clinics, which in the main have been efficiently operated by competent obstetricians, have materially reduced the accidents of labor, and are showing some reduction in the incidence of infection and eclampsia. A total of 4,878 women died of eclampsia in the year 1927, or one death in every 600 births.
Unless we can view with complacency the 4,878 annual deaths from eclampsia (puerperal albuminuria and convulsions), it would seem essential that each suggested line of treatment, if tried, be reported in sufficient detail to enable other workers to judge its merits and adopt it as a basic treatment, supplemented, when necessary, by such symptomatic measures as may be indicated, or, on the contrary, discard it as a failure and search along more promising lines.
Some obstetricians now empty the uterus by a major surgical procedure