The Plunket Society.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18138, 30 July 1924, Page 8

The Plunket Society.

The speeches made last night at the annual meeting of the Plunket Society •would, only a very few years ago, have seemed fantastic nonsense. We hal no more idea a generation ago of the extent to which we. were sacrificing life, than we have now of. the extent to which the Plunket teaching is promoting health. For the most striking fact about the whole movement »

after all not the ndmber of babies who have been saved from death during their first year. That makes a powerful appeal to the imagination, but what, appeals more to those who see far enough and deep enough is the change that is gradually coming over all ages and classes in the matter of healthy living generally. Just as. in the ol'i days, the number of babies who actually died was about .one-fifth of the number who were more or. less permanently injured, so under the new teach ing the number admittedly saved is a mere fraction of those who are improved, and of the fathers and mothers whose ideas and habits have undergone a Plunket change. It wa3 right, too, that both Dr. Aeland anJ Dr. Truby King should have made reference to the relation between natural births and the subsequent well-being of both mother and child. This is n matter on which a good deal has already been said in "The Press," and we are not now concerned with the controversial aspects as they affect t]ic medical practitioner; but it may be pointed out that there would havo been no controversy, and no apportioning of professional praise or blame, if mothers-' themselves had always realised, and insisted on, the advantages of natural delivery wherever that is within the limits of human endurance. Then Dr. King stressed again, as the report did, the absurdity of the criticism that Plunket methods keep babies alive who would bo better dead. So far as our very limited intelligence can see there always have been, and always Vv ill be, survivals the wisdom and mcrey of which we cannot appreciate. It is obvious, too, that a congenital idiot will have a better chance of living if fed liaturally by its mother ana given sunshine and fresh air, and to the extent to which the Society encourages natural feeding and natural living it is helping indirectly to rear such unfortunates. But if the Society is to be blamed for advocating these aids, Providence is to be blamed far more for supplying them, and those who saddle the Society with the responsibility of filling Che land with undesirables had better realise what they are doing. The fact is, only a very small amount of weakness and disease i 3 hereditary and incurable. Letting children die because they are made ill by bad food and bad air is the same thing scientifically as refusing an antidote to an adult who has swallowed poison. It is ignorant and inhuman fatalism, and if it happened in spite of that to be good for the race the people • of New Zealand would be rapidly degenerating. Natural selection of the fatalistic kind has had a fairly good chance in the Old World slum, and those who prefer the result to that achieved by prevention—those and no others —are justified in condemning- the work and methods so earnestly expounded last night.