OUR BABIES.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIV, Issue 18820, 7 March 1931, Page 11 (Supplement)

OUR BABIES.

Published under the auspices of the Royal New Zealand Society for the Health of Women and Children (Plunket Society). “It is wiser to put up a fence at the top of a precipice than to maintain an ambulance at the bottom.” (By HYGEIA). At the present time much is being said and written on matters connected with the health of the expectant mother and her unborn child. The following extracts from an article written by Dr. Kathleen Vaughan were published in the last issue of the Maternity and Child Welfare magazine, and should prove of great interest to all concerned in the health and wellbeing of the rising generation:— “The value of sunshine to the pregnant woman has been emphasised by many observers, but Dr. Kathleen Vaughan in the last issue of Sunlight, the journal of the Sunlight League, gave a vivid description of its importance to the mother long before pregnancy. Dr. Vaughan has had the care of many women, of Kasmir during pregnancy and childbirth, and her experience has taught her that the country mothers who work in the fields sowing rice and labouring with the men, clad in a single garment, never come to the hospital for confinement. Childbirth is a simple and natural process among them, while among the richer classes the women living in purdah frequently suffer a difficult labour, and are constantly ailing as a result of their life of indoor seclusion. Exposed to the direct rays of the sun the skin is able to produce vitamin D, which is essential to the proper growth of bone; without it calcification is irregular and incomplete, and the softened bones bend, giving rise to deformities of rickets. In older women deprived of sunlight and fed on a diet deficient in vitamin D the bones lose their calcium, and the condition known as osteomalacia arises., in which first the pelvis becomes deformed, and later the whole skeleton may be deformed. In both rickets and osteomalacia there is a tendency for the teeth to decay, and Dr. Vaughan sets an important value on the state of the teeth as an indication of good health.

“Like the peasants of Kashmir, the Scottish women in Highland districts are workers in the open air, and good teeth are the rule among them. Dr. Vaughan quotes the Carnegie Trust report, which noted that children in many Scottish districts had perfect teeth, like their elders, until they went to school. In districts where teeth were good midwifery reports were satisfactory. She also mentions the custom of the young men of Czecho-Slo-vakia, who choose their brides for

their good teeth regardless, it seems, of other qualities which might promise well for married happiness. “Dr. Vaughan's experience leads her to conclude that the proper development of the prospective mother must be studied from the moment of her birth, and one of the chief factors in the production of a normal skeleton is the light of the sun. An open-air life, with plain natural food, she finds, is always accompanied by easy childbirth. The girl who has acquired rickets in her early years grows up with a deformed pelvis, which obstructs labour when her turn comes to be a mother. Prevention of the disasters of maternity must therefore begin in infancy. There must be no long hours of sitting with dangling legs for the young child whose pelvis is still soft. Schools should consist of a roof to keep off the rain, but no walls or windows to obstruct sunshine. Dr. Vaughan quotes the experiment of Sir Henry Gauvain at Alton, where children from an open-air school outdistanced older children from indoor schools in mental tests. It is not the body alone which profits by natural existence, but the mind as well."