THE ACCIDENT-PRONE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23263, 4 February 1939, Page 18

THE ACCIDENT-PRONE

Sir, —Numbers of your readers in various parts of New Zealand welcome your strong advocacy from time to time of the prevention of road accidents. When this problem shall eventually be taken up in a scientific manner, it will be seen that accident-proneness and ill-health proneness may be tackled effectively only by. starting with the child in its earliest years and by providing facilities for nutritional, psychological, recreational, occupational and medical care, simultaneously, to "the father (and the mother) of the man (and woman)." Our contemporaries whose "perceptions are dull and whose physical and mental reactions are slow or faulty" (to quote vour leader of January 28) have little hope of complete cure. There is all the mora urgent need, then, for taking immediate steps to prevent the causation of similarly dull and faulty perceptions in the generations that will succeed us. Not only do accidents result from the psychological and phvsical impediments of the merely duil.

The highest authority yet constituted to inquire into the causes of mental defect and disability has published its findings that tho majority of all asylum cases of the present generation are tho offspring—not of the previous generation of the insane—but of the "merely dull" people who abound increasingly in all civilised countries. Thus, even + die problem of road accidents, when thoroughly investigated, will lead us back to the comprehensive proposals of the Physical and Mental Welfare Society of New Zealand, i.e., that a co-ordinated national health research council bo established, comprising representatives of tho various sciences governing physical and mental health, to the end that every individual member of the race may be given full facilities for the prevention of ill-health of every kind (including accidentproneness) from the crib to the coffin. D. Harris.