PLUNKET WORK

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 138, 8 December 1938, Page 19

PLUNKET WORK

DR. MARTIN TWEED ABROAD

(By Air Mail, from "The Posts London

Representative.)

LONDON, November 10,

Dr. M. B. M. Tweed (Heretaunga), late medical adviser to the Plunket Society, has been travelling widely in England and Scotland, and visited the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow. Here, it was a disappointment to him to find no evidence in the New Zealand pavilion of Sir Truby King's life work for the Dominion. However, he was honoured by being the guest of the Lord Provost of Glasgow at a luncheon.

While in Edinburgh, Dr. Tweed spent some time with medical confreres, and he hopes to return there shortly to discuss Truby King methods. It has been suggested by one of the Truby King nurses that the greater interest that has been taken by the medical profession in this country has been engendered by so many thinking mothers following New Zealand methods.

While in Liverpool, Dr. Tweed did post-graduate and investigation work, and he has also been working at his Alma Mater —Guy's Hospital, in London —where he was warmly welcomed by old friends and co-workers, and by his former chief, Sir Arbuthnot Lane, whose guest he is to be at the coming dinner of the United Hospitals Club.

Last week Dr. Tweed spent a long afternoon with a medical man who is conversant and in agreement with Truby King work at a London County Council fever hospital, where special new wards have been opened for children suffering from enteritis, the disease which Sir Truby King taught was caused by persistent wrong feeding. He maintained that the seriousness of the death rate from this cause was as nothing compared to the damage rate. At this particular fever hospital the disease is to be considered and studied.

Reference was made in a South African paper recently to the Plunket movement, which the writer described as being based on an alliance»between common sense and medical knowledge. It was, and is, simple in its principles, but the widening of medical knowledge nowadays makes it less simple in its application.