Champion Baby Killer.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXIV, Issue 911, 4 November 1933, Page 10

Champion Baby Killer.

Dear Sir.—Professor Calmette .has made his last trek. “Of the dead, say only what is good.” Well, it can be said truthfully that he was a champion. He was, in fact, the champion baby-killer of the last fifteen years, and the birth control societies owe him a tombstone, anyway, for he has left so many pupils behind that the thinningout will go on ad lib. It is said that one of them, a Yankee, did not wait till the daisies grew over his ‘teacher, but put in print that all other sera—the stuff made out of the blood of old, sick, worn-out horses—are useless and poisonous; only his own brew is to be trusted. There isn’t now that sense of honour among thieves one could rely on in better days than these. Well, Calmette was Pasteur’s son, sure enough; he cured some, and when the stuff paralysed or set up festering sores, the undertakers and the doctors covered up the mess tidily, and sales went on like hot cakes at a fair. Lubeck wasn’t his Waterloo by any means, though it wiped out seventy-six straight off and disabled many kiddies for life. We are funny people, we humans, and like witch-brews far better than sunlight and fresh milk. Besides, not many of his previous healing flutters got an airing in the papers—only in the medical gazettes, where Doctor So-and-so of this slum infirmary or that foundling hospital is thanked for lending twenty or forty babies to inoculate or physic. If they died, how they died was nobody’s business. These little things are all in the serum-selling day’s work, though some would say it stuck to the fingers all the same as serummaking, and that would sicken a South American broncho-puncher. It is a sight, they say, to see the old horses scatter when they see the healer coming. But that is no good: they are rounded up to get it sharp and deep in the neck; when the specified pints of blood are drawn, off the old, diseased horses go to make more. What a blessed, holy thing science is, to be sure! But I like it best when it does its bit according to nature, its nature, with no Lubecks or Medallins, or Bundabergt, or Dallases to spoil the game. See how the English poison gas factory, Porton, plays it. No moral prosing about suffering humanity; all set for science’s drop scene in the tragedy that's coming. You can’t fail and you need not tell lies; just work out the worst that you and science can do; you are out to kill and you kill. There's a record kept at Porton of how many animals are killed there to keep civilisation safe; the worst death, the highest success. When we come to grips at last, Providence will keep tally of the humans; we shall all be in the fighting line. When our few’ descendants begin to wear clothes and worry about alphabets again, they will wonder where they and we might have bee*, if the Calmettes and the bacteriologists had just let red science alone; it was own brother to red rubber, you see. Can't we put a spoke in our own wheel even now? You have got a Humanitarian and AntiVivisection Society in this town—we have scores of them in England. Can’t you join it and boost it up while there's still time to save something? After all, its oar affair in the end.—l am. etc., VALENTINE VOX.