Bay of Plenty Beacon Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. WEDNESDAY, FEB. 19, 1947 OUR CRIPPLED CHILDREN—DID YOU KNOW?

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 96, 19 February 1947, Page 4

Bay of Plenty Beacon Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. WEDNESDAY, FEB. 19, 1947 OUR CRIPPLED CHILDREN—DID YOU KNOW?

QUIETLY, unostentatiously, the work of the N.Z. Crippled Children’s Society, goes on in our midst. Efficiently performing the work envisiaged by its philanthropic founder Lord Nuffield, its officers are to be seen in action in all parts of the Dominion, bringing the cripples to a state of realisation and usefulness, and ever applying the hopeful slogan The erasure of all cripples from the pension lists.’ In Whakatane, a small committee comprising the medical fraternity and a few others is carrying on the good work, which now embraces the treatment of malformations and disfigurements in children. Plastic surgery has come into the grand work of charity for the little ones, and now dozens of ugly disfigurements, cleft palates, hare-lips and accidental injuries are treated in the Societys clinic and restored as near perfect as possible by modern scientific methods. Let us see what is happening in our own district. In the Whakatane district there are between 30 and 40 cases. Each sufferer is visited once a month and examined. Cases needing expert attention are despatched to the Wilson Home, and held there until complete or partial recovery. Take the case of a boy of 13 years discovered in Auckland—hopelessly disabled; merely killing time around his home. The Society secured him, educated him, put strength into his paralysed limbs, sent him to University until last year he passed in his favourite subject Mathematics with highest honours and is now regarded as the most brilliant student in his line in the country. Another boy, taken from a sharemilkers farm near Rotorua. He had a burning desire to become an engineer. It was impossible under his own family’s circumstances to do so, but with the Society behind him he was apprenticed to a firm in Auckland, and actually sponsored by the Engineers Union in the process. Today he is the proud owner of his own garage in Cambridge. What sort of a life would either of these boys have been doomed to? Now for the plastic surgery; the Society has a'steadily growing number of patients. In the Opotiki district two years ago, a tired Maori mother breast-feeding her infant fell asleep and forced the child’s whole face over a naked candle flame. Incredible as it sounds, the frenzied shrieks of the little sufferer failed to rouse the mother, and when finally discovered the unconscious child had such sickening disfigurements, as to be beyond description. The Society took the child and Dr. Pickerell regarding the little sufferer as a test for his own profession, rebuilt the cheek and lip flesh, fashioned a new nose and now has a presentable human being well on the way to recovery. Another mother of a child with a double hare-lip, wept tears of joy when she received it back nine weeks later, almost unrecognisable in its changed appearance. All traces of the operation apart from a few faint lines on the lips were removed, and a note from the surgeon described the massage treatment which would gradually dispose of even these. Innumerable cases of this nature are now coming to light, but the public knows all too little of them. Independent of Government assistance or grant the work of the Society goes forward, and we look to the day when it will be publicly recognised by every New Zealander for what it is, and for what it does.