OUR BABIES,

Evening Post, Volume LXXX, Issue 62, 10 September 1910, Page 15

OUR BABIES,

(By Hygeia.)

Published under the auspices of tho society for the Promotion ot the Health of Women and Children. "It U wiser to put up a fence i>t the top of a precipice than to maintain an ambulance at the bottom." 'ADDRESS OF PLUNKET NURSE AND SECRETARY. Wellington— Plunket Nurse M'Donald. 75, Aro-street. Tel. 2425. Hon. sec, Mrs. ! M'Vicar, 27. Brougham-street. Plunket Nurse's services free. . IMPORTANCE OF REARING HEALTHY CHILDREN. /There are probably few people in New 'Zealand who realise the stupendous importance which is now attached by leading thinkers and workers in the Old World and in America to the rearing of healthy children. Still less do they know ac to the praotical measures which are being taken to ensure, as far as possible, that every child shall be given a fair chance to develop into a fit and capable citizen. Strenuous efforts aro now being made to stem the tendency of our time to spoil the new being before it is a year old. This is very clearly conveyed in the following extracts from W. H. Dawson's illuminating book, ''The Evolution of Modern Gecmany" : — '"In Germany a vast amount of effort is being directed, in systematic and well reasoned ways, towards the production of a stronger and more vigorous race. Germany is showing wisdom in taking up the population .question in. the cradle, and en-, •deavouring to ensure the healta and virility of the stock at its source, instead of being content with merely patching up a decrepit manhood and womanhood, upon Which neglect; and deterioration have already done their worst. '» "Although the crusade against infantile mortality is still in the initial stages, experience has already shown the entire fieedlessness of a great part of the sacriftce of life which has been going on unchecked for so many years. No sooner 'have remedial measures been applied in any iooality than a large decline in mortality has at once been effected, proving that the loss to the nation of infants under the age of 12 months has been unnecessary, the result of ignorance, apathy, and fatalism combined. To-day the old idea that the high mortality of infants of tender years is a wise provision of Nature, intended to weed out the unfit, is virtually obsolete in Germany. A very large part of this mortality has been proved to be due to conditions such as artificial feeding, fouled food, insanitary dwellings, absence of light and air, etc., whioh are in the highest degree unnatural, and cannot therefore be regarded as falling in with any rational theory of selection. It is held that to regard infants jvho perish through causes like these as predoorued by Nature to extinction is as sensible as to condemn as unfit the child who is thrown out of a window or burned to death in a locked-up room." This German conclusion is very interesting to us in New Zealand, because the Btock phrases used by opponents of the Society for the Health of Women and Children in the past have been "Keeping alive the unfit," "pandering to vice," etc. Now the vast majority of illegitimate babies (over 80 in 100 throughout New Zealand, for instance) • survive in any case, but when they grow up then tend to swell the ranks of the unemployed, the unemployable, the submerged, the sick, and the criminal, mainly because they have been improperly reared, especially during infancy. '"111-health means unemployableness, unemployableness begets morbid thought and feeling, and morbid thought and feeling mean loafing, vice, and crime." The surest way to keep down vice is to keep up Health. The surest way to "pander to vice" is to ill-treat babies. _ However, our New Zealand Health Mission for mother and child is not one directed specially to the care of so-called unfortunates. Only a small proportion of the babies at the Karitane Hospital, for instance, come from the submerged; they come from homes of all classes — happy homes, in general, apart from the sickness of the baby. As for the Plunket Nurses, not a tenth, possibly not a . twentieth, of the babies they attend are born out of wedlock. In a word, the aim of the society is a broadly educational one — a simple practical Health Mission, appealing to all 'and trusting to be of service to all classes alike.' %