The Plunket Society

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22435, 23 June 1938, Page 10

The Plunket Society

It is a fundamental principle of democracy that no person or institution is above criticism and the Plunket Society has been receiving its fair share. No doubt the society will reply in due course, and when all the data are available it should be possible for experts to determine in what respects, if any, the system can be improved. Meanwhile the mothers of New Zealand may be well advised to suspend judgment. The function of the society, as pointed out by Mrs Cracroft Wilson in these columns, is to keep normal babies healthy and normal. Sick babies come within the province of the medical profession and the society’s nurses have the strictest orders to treat these only under medical supervision, orders which are rigidly obeyed often in the face of the strongest opposition from the mother. Normal healthy babies rarely come under a doctor’s care, but the society handles many thousands annually and keeps records of each case. Upon these records the reputation of the society is firmly based. No human theory is permanent. Einstein has displaced Newton and Rutherford has disrupted the atom and with it the Atomic Theory of Dalton. The -Plunket Society has one object only, the welfare of the mothers and babies, and may be trusted to admit its errors and amend its system when a better is found, as it has done many times in the past. Meanwhile it is well to remember that in 1907, when the society was founded, infantile mortality in New Zealand was 88 in every thousand as against 30.96 to-day; and We should be chary of discarding too hastily a system which has accomplished this result and placed New Zealand in the position of having the lowest infant mortality in the world.