THE PLUNKET SOCIETY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 2595, 19 June 1923, Page 2

THE PLUNKET SOCIETY.

The Christchurch Press, in,a laudatory article on the eiety, suggests that it has a dangerous age. Everyone speaks well of it. Branches have been established all over the Dominion, and to criticise their work would require some temerity. Yet if one wished to criticise, it would be difficult to know where to begin. There is no trace anywhere that he praises which everyone now sounds have had any effect in relaxing vigilance or inducing a mood of complacency. Under the relentless pressure of Dr. Truby King the Society is addressing itself to new problems every year, and it is not exaggerating to say that the results are dramatic. Societies are saving from death a total of 1,000 babies every year. If the infantile death rate were as high to-day as it was when the Plunket Society was formed sixteen years ago the mothers of the Dominion would rear one thousand fewer babies each year than they actually do rear. That surely is dramatic. But as Dr. Truby King points out, and everyone must recognise the moment attention has been drawn to it, the damage rate is always five or six times as high as the death rate. The causes which formerly brought about 1,000 unnecessary deaths every year were gravely injuring and in many eases bandicapping for life, from 5, 000 to 6,000 other children who did somehow survive; and in eliminating those deaths the Society has eliminated at the same time an incalculable amount of later unfitness and suffering. Dramatic does not seem too strong a word for that change. If indeed there were not limits beyond which reform may go a further five years of Plunket imrsing and teaching would end infant death altogether. There is almost no analysis of the .figures supplied by the Society that does not produce astonishment. It was said the other day in Wellington that what the Society had done for the Dominion was to give the mothers “health consciousness.” That was perhaps anticipating results a little. But as the medical profession all over the Dominion is now in hearty co-operation with the Society, and as the work is educative and preventive far more than curative, it is clear that we are on the way to a general health consciousness and that we are moving to that goal far more rapidly than any other countrv in the world.