A VITAL PROBLEM

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20105, 26 March 1928, Page 6

A VITAL PROBLEM

MATERNAL MORTALITY MR BONNEY IN WANGANUI A distinguished visitor to Wanganui during- the latter part of last week was Air .Victor Bonney, the well-known English obstetrician and gynaecologist who recently addressed, the meeting of the British Medical Association at Hamilton and who has been specially invited to the Dominion by the New Zealand Obstetrical Society.

Air Bonney, who addressed local medical men at the Wanganui Hospital contends that although child-birth is a natural event, there are attendant risks which call for special care, and this care should be properly organised. Although he does not insist that childbirth is an event that can be better supervised in a properly organised maternity hospital than in the mother’s home, he does not disguise his opinion that the former would be the preferable course. Nor does be conceal his impression that our specialist resources in this department of the medical practice are inadequate. The Professor of Aledicine at the Medical School in Dunedin receives £7OO a year and the Clinical Professor £5OO. Thfl Professor of Surgery receives £6OO and .his assistant £2OO. In each of these departments 150 lectures are given. In the department of obstetrics and gynaecology, however, 60 lectures only are given and these by a lecturer whose remuneration is £l9O. Air Bonney points out that the haphazard* methods of the past are gradually being left behind and further special knowledge and training may valuably help iu the solving of the problem of maternal mortality.