The Wanganui Chronicle. "NULLA DIES SINE LINEA." TUESDAY, JUNE 3, 1924. HEALTH AND THE CHILD

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 19029, 3 June 1924, Page 4

The Wanganui Chronicle. "NULLA DIES SINE LINEA." TUESDAY, JUNE 3, 1924. HEALTH AND THE CHILD

More and more are people coming to realise that the hope of good health — perhaps the most priceless of all earthly boons —rests largely with the children. Indeed, it has been well said that probably the most significant and gratifying feature of pres-ent-day medical science is the importance being assigned to, and the attention being given to, the child. The profession’s work is mostly a form of physical patching when it is dealing with the middle-aged and elderly. It deals with the young in order, as far as possible, to make future patching unnecessary. And so enlightened students of public health problems are coming to realise that if the children can be guided into health-preserving habits, if they can be indoctrinated with sound health principles, the future will be in large measure delivered from that physical enfeeblemcnt and torture which millions in past times needlessly suffered. Doctors are increasingly concentrating their care on the children. And it is well that it should be so. But as medical science has worked back from curing symptoms to eradicating causes, so the condition of the child must be traced back to the health and wisdom of the mother. Between the ages of one and five, according to medical testimony, is the most dangerous stage in baby life. The responsible agent in these years is the mother. And it is to be feared that many a child loses any hope it ever had of a healthy body because its mother has never been trained for her job. Amid the myriad phases of health, good and ill, one cardinal principle stands clear—training for motherhood should be required of every woman. The great mass of children are swathed in affection, and an outspoken champion of the helpless innocents has not hesitated to declare that in numberless instances the child would be happier and grow up healthier if it were possible to barter some of the love of the mother for the skill of the nursed Despite all the splendid work of child clinics and gratuitous medical propaganda, ignorant motherhood is rampant. Even the child healthily born is handicapped by being unhealthily reared. Thousands of New Zealand mothers have reared, for their own joy and for their country’s service, splendidly healthy eons and daughters. Nevertheless there is still a considerable proportion of ignorant motherhood. The work of dispelling that ignorance must inevitably take time; but happily, largely through the agency of the Plunket system, New Zealand has made, and is still making, much greater headway in the right direction than most other countries. Speaking in Melbourne some months ago Dr. Truby King suggested i that the efficiency of the Plunket sys- ■ tem might be tested from the results I obtained in New Zealand, in comparison with Australia, where it was not i entirely adopted. In 1907 the infantile death rate was practically the same in both countries, 20 for every 1000 births. In Dunedin, however,

after the Plunket system had been introduced, the mortality of infants in the first year from diarrhoea was reduced to nine from 1908 to 1913, to four from 1913 to 1918, and to less than one from 1918 to 1922. In the year 1918 not one single child under two years of age died in Dunedin of gastro-enteritis and diarrhoea, and the rate for the whole of New Zealand averaged only 3 per 1000 births for the last five years. In the Commonwealth of Australia it was 12 per 1000 births. In accounting for this low infantile death rate in New Zealand, as compared with Australia, it had been suggested that there were special microbes in Australia, that the New Zealand climate was more temperate and that their cities were smaller. Dr. Truby King pointed out, however, that originally the infantile mortality differed very slightly in the two countries. In Tasmania, which was practically under the same conditions as New Zealand, the death rate from infantile diarrhoea had only been reduced to 11 when it was three in New Zealand, while in regard to the cities, when the death rate for 1913 to 1917 was 4 per 1000 in Dunedin, it was 19J in Hobart, and for the last five years Dunedin averaged less than 1 per 1000 as against 15 per 1000 for Hobart. In a city such as Auckland, where the death rate had been up to 40 per 1000, infantile diarrhoea had been reduced to 3, and the same thing would happen in Melbourne if nurses were properly trained in this particular work, and went out among the people and educated the mothers. Dr. Truby King confidently predicted that if the same system was whole-heartedly adopted in Australia it would mean the saving of at least 1000 babies in Victoria alone. Only persistent education will ultimately lead to the elimination of that type of foolish, loving mother who is indulgent when she should deny, who cannot grasp the importance of hygiene in the home, and who regulates her children’s health according to the maxims her grandmother practised and bequeathed. Years ago Dr. Truby King preached the value of education. Today he is able to speak from experience of its beneficent results.