MORE PROTECTION NEEDED.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 179, 30 July 1936, Page 6

MORE PROTECTION NEEDED.

(To the Editor.)

You lately reported an address by the late headmaster of King's College in which he ridiculed the way that mothers dressed their sons nowadays. He thought that plenty 0 f warm clothes made lads "soft." I don't know what reason he had for this opinion, but I do know that he is entirely mistaken. The way that it has, up till the change Mr. Major notices, been the fashion to dress boys is unhealthy, most uncomfortable, and cannot be supported from any point of view. The doctors paid by the Government go round the country to the schools advocating that children should be so dressed that the air can circulate freely over the skin—as it certainly can in the case of boys, and the girls are little better. Now I ask what analogy in Nature is there for such an extraordinary idea? Does the air get to the skin of any animal at all? Is not the bare skin most carefully protected from the slightest contact with the air, even in summer? Are we more strongly built than them ? Do they die off as we do with consumption, although they often live in paddocks with only a barbed-wire fence to shelter them from every storm that blows? Xo, I would like to make Mr. Major sit for hours in a cold, draughty schoolroom dressed so that "a butterfly can flutter up his skin with- { out damaging the down on its wings." I know this, sir, as a medical man of long colonial experience, that all the adenoids and tonsils (which procure a fine harvest for the doctors) are solely and wholly due to the way children's skin is exposed to the air. And I have witnessed lads going from their country homes where mother-sense did something to protect them, to Grammar School in town; and some half of them returned ruined in health and stopped at home. I know, too, that chilblains are quite common among Grammar bovs in Auckland, and that these are due to want of clothes. I would remind your readers that in the early Victorian hovels the heroines would go into a."decline" if any trouble befell them, and how until quite recently the women were regarded as the weaker sex and more delicately made. And why was this? Because they dressed in low necks and high sleeves. Since they dressed more reasonably we have discovered that they are as able as the bovs to play tennis, cricket, hockey, and football, too. Was it possible to imagine them in shorts. And let me add that if we go back to the open dresses, as we are doing, the girls will soon bo all falling with consumption 1 , as indeed they are beginning to do. When will common sense prevail against fashion? M.D., Lond., M.R.C.S., Eng.