NEWS AND NOTES.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXV, Issue 1147, 18 September 1913, Page 4

NEWS AND NOTES.

The largest telegraph office in the world is in the General Post Office building, London. There are over 3000 operators, 1000 of whom are women. The batteries are supplied by 30,000 cells.

A minister of the name of Sparks was the father of 13 children. At the baptism of the thirteenth, an aged brother divine, desirous to choose what seemed to him an appropriate description of the life of man, called on the congregation to join in singing the fifth paraphrase, beginning with the line, “ As sparks in close succession rise.” He could not understand the people’s merriment until, when he descended from the pulpit, things were explained to him.

At the hearing of a truancy case at the Takaka Court recently, the Magistrate (Mr J. S. Evans) said, “ it was a most unreasonable thing to expect a parent to obtain a medical certificate of illness in cases where children were kept at home for that reason.” His Worship went on to say that such requirement might involve poor parents in heavy 7 expenses in country districts which they could ill afford while teachers or members of school committees could just as easily satisfy themselves of the bona fides of parents claiming exemption from the attendance at school of children said to be sick.

At a recent meeting of the Dunedin Hospital Board, Dr Marshall questioned whether sanatorium treatment would tend to reduce the amount of consumption in the country. It was true that sanatorium treatment prolonged the life ot the patient, but it also prolonged his capacity as a carrier of disease. He did not believe in that treatment, and the Board should get the State to help to extend the work done in the patients’ department, and see that nurses should visit patients after they bad left the sanatorium. He did not wish to have them treated as criminals, but they ought to be under the control ot the State and visited by Stale nurses and State doctors. More good would be done in that way. and by seeing that consumptives did not follow occupations where they were handling food or clothing used by other people. The Friedmann treatment had not proved successful, but he thought bacteriologists were agreed that it was on the lines ot the F'riedmann treatment that something must be evolved, and he believed that they were on the verge of a discovery which would help them to treat consumption properly, which sanatorium treatment would not do.