To Be Well Keep Well

Northland Age, Volume 1, Issue 5, 6 November 1931, Page 9

To Be Well Keep Well

The best means of fighting disease is to keep well. This sounds like an unnecessary statement, but infection and contagion have a difficult time thriving in a body that is physically fit. The enemies of disease in a well body will fight hard to prevent intrusion. Proper diet, exercise, sunshine and fresh air, and physical and mental rest will help one to “keep fit.” Preventative medicine has had a marvellous growth in the last century resulting in the ability to control many diseases that flourished before that time. In olden days, if illness overtook a person it was charged up to Fate—or even was designated as an act of God. To-day some of these same diseases are practically unheard of, some rarely occur—and in almost all cases individuals have to assume the blame for contracting the trouble. Preventative medicine is not a new idea at all. Even nations that we feel are not so progressive as we have had in their medical treatment a similar thought. Chinese people pay the doctors when they are well, but do not pay them when they are sick. It is not many years past that many mothers agreed with the wellknown slogan of an American flour manufacturer “Eventually, why not now?” They calmly said, “Every child has to have these children’s diseases; why not now while they are young?” When on@ child contracted measels, mumps or whooping cough, mothers even put the children to sleep with the ailing ones—in order to “get it over quickly.” This almost barbaric attitude has changed. We realise that it is criminal to permit a child to be subjected to any disease without doing everything possible to prevent his contracting such. I The germ theory has been an ineresting development. It has shown the origin and course of contagion and infection. Study has shown how to combat infection when these enemies | have entered in the body—and, greatest of all, have discovered how to prevent them from starting in their disastrous work. This has meant freedom of the individual from infectious and communicable diseases, but more wonderful, it has meant that whole communities can be safeguarded.

A PIONEER PASSES ON The British Empire has just lost its first woman M.P., Mrs. Louise McKinney, who has died in Canada, aged 63. She was a champion of the home, and did valuable work to promote temperance. So engaging was her personality and so sound her reputation for good sense that she gained a seat in the Alberta Legislature in 1917. It was the first time a woman had been elected to a Parliamentary body in the British Empire. Two years later England followed Canada’s lead, and Lady Astor became a member of the Imperial Parliament. When are we going to have a woman M.P. in New Zealand? THE TINIEST BABY The world must seem a very big place indeed to Mary, the Indian baby born recently at Pretoria. She was so very little at birth that they did not dare to weigh her in case the act might injure her ; but after fourteen days, Mary was taken from her bed of cotton wool, and she managed to prove that she was a real human being right enough by weighing three pounds! Mary cannot manage an ordinary baby’s feeding-bottle, so the hospital authorities had to send out for a doll’s bottle for her! She must still be very awed by the bigness of everything. GO, LOVELY STARS Go, lovely stars; sink, sink, pale moon, For the shy dawn is coming to England In her white, beautiful robes— It is the morn of morns, And the birds are singing That a ship is due at Dover, 0, a ship is due at Dover, And my love, my love, is aboard!