ADENOIDS AND CONSUMPTION.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 7077, 15 March 1910, Page 5

ADENOIDS AND CONSUMPTION.

- ADVICE TO MOTHERS. THE CURSE OF THE COMFORTER, In view of the fact that Dr Trnby King demonstrated to his audience at Dunedin on Thursday night that the presence of adenoids in a child's mouth is often a precursor (and always a predisposing cause) to tuberculosis, the most 'significant statement for us in his lecture was one, based on the observation of two physicians, "that 50 per cent, of the children on the Flat suffer from adenoids." An adenoid is an abnormal growth of tissue blocking the air-way behind the nostrils. Children suffering from this obstruction wake at night from horrible dreams of suffocation (which is actually threatened), filled with dread. They become stunted, narrow-chested, vacuous-looking because of the necessity of keeping their mouths open, and actually vacuous and weak in intelligence because they are starved of air. They are fit soil for that fell disease consumption, which Bunyan called "the captain of the men. of death." The text of Dr Truby Kong's' lecture was (says the "Star") this: Adenoids and consumption are preventable; therefore, why are they not ■ prevented ? His masterly analysis of the subject.showed how they may be prevented; how such a disease as consumption, which annually .accounts for 5,000,000 lives (a London of people), may be exterminated. We shall dip into T>r King's bog, and select from the rood, things, as space allows. A Inrman being (says the doctor) can. live without food for three weeks (or mare); he can live without water for days;, be can live without:air for

I three minutes. -And yet it is of air that [we starve ourselves and our children !

Speaking of cradles covered with muslins and the pretty things that the averago mother loves to adorn her child's bed with, and the big draped hoods: If you were more concerned about your baby than about its clothes, which I reglet to say you are not . . . you would know that it is lying in a tub of carbonic acid. . . . When the temperature is in tho neighbourhood of 80 degrees, the foul air hangs like a black cloud over the baby. it is a veritable Black Hole of Calcutta. Nurses habitually have the idea that tho best thing to do with the child alter the bath is to toast its toss before !.ie lire, lying on the floor. One hundred Uiousand cubic feet of air are streaming along the floor to supply the fire per hour, iho baby is literally pelted with bullets of air. . . . What people do with their brains, I do not know, unless they use them up in getting what is known as a modern education.

Babies do not go "on. the burst"; they are strictly amenable to what you would have them do. Babies do not die; they are killed.

And now the remedies. Dr King proceeds to show how, with plenty of air, proper food "properly given,'' due exercise, children should never suffer from adenoids. They are "strictly preventable."

Firstly, the baby must not lie with its 1 mother, nor in a cradle 'longside her. Tho window must be open, and a proper current of air contrived between window and fireplace, or d<x>r, . and the mother must lie on one side of the stream of air, the child on the other (protected from direct impact by a screen if necessary). Again, the big hood of the ordinary porambulator was merely a well for carbonic acid gas, at the bottom of which the child lay. The doctor's illustration showed a special hood, with adjustable blinds, invented ■by Lady Plunket. On the question of food the lecturer insisted upon the necessity of something more than pap food, so that by hard chewing tho teeth, might be kept good and the jaw properly formed. With every curse at his disposal he cursed the "dummy," which loci to the narrowing of the jaws (as the illustration showed), ths reduction in size of the nasal cavity, tho reduction of the air-way, and malformations and adenoids. Another illustration showed a baby half-asleep sucking its milk through the long-tubed bottle, which tho lecturer described as a "sewer"; and yet another showed a baby takicg its food properly, the nurse holdin--' the bottle at the right angle, the child kicking, and working its limbs an the way it should.' . "Man was never meant to be the. inferior of the microbe," says Dr Truby King "If we train mothers to give the baby proper air, food, and exercise, especially exercise to shape the mouth jaws, and.teeth,..instead' of letting the milk passively dribble down the throat and instead of perversely nioulding the growing structures in deformity by the use of the comforter and other., pernioshabirs, we need have little anxiety as to tuberculosis or any othei such *Lrt°£, conclusion, quote as did T»r Kims, from the speech of tho Hon. twLiTvrrnJ M P., at the London TuberSCS 1909, on the causes of consumption: . ■ ISrow, I come to another practical