EXPERT ADVICE ON HEALTH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 98, 9 May 1941, Page 9

EXPERT ADVICE ON HEALTH

"The Listener" Launches Weekly Series OF Authoritative Articles

Are you interested in health? You must be to some extent or you would not be alive to read this. But there is a big difference between merely keeping alive and keeping well. In point of fact, most of us have probably become more health-conscious today than ever before, but with so many voices proclaiming ways to keep well it would be strange if we were not sometimes bewildered to know which to listen to and accept as authoritative. So we are sure that our readers will welcome the series of short and informative articles on health and diet which we launch in this issue. These articles are written by Dr. Muriel Bell, Nutritionist to the Department of Health, and by Dr. H. B. Turbott, Director of the Division of School Hygiene; and that they are authoritative is obvious from the summaries of the writers’ careers on this page. Dr. Bell and Dr. Turbott will take it in turn each week to contribute these articles, which will include such topics as "Canned Foods," "Nutrition and the Teeth," "Colds, the Common Enemy," "Family Pets and Family Health," "The Argument for Wholemeal Bread," "Liver and Bacon," "Dr. Diet,. Dr. Quiet, and Dr. Merryman," "Influenza," "How to Avoid Tuberculosis," "The Adolescent Appetite," "Food for the Expectant and Nursing Mother," "Sore Throats," "Household Pests," and many others. equally as varied and vital. The first of the series appears below.

D®. H. B. TURBOTT is a graduate in medicine of the New Zealand University. After a period of house surgeon’s work in New Zealand he went to South China in 1923 where he had experience in hospital work and maternity and child welfare work in villages, and did research under the Rockefeller Foundation and post-graduate study at the Peking University. In 1926 and 1927 he was back in New Zealand ‘as lecturer in Bacteriology at Otago University. After securing the Diploma of Public Health, he was appointed Medical Officer of Health and School Medical Officer at the East Cape, where he spent the next six years. While in that area he carried out research into nutrition by a mass milkfeeding experiment in 1931 as well as research into the susceptibility of children to tuberculosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and hydatids. and work on the prevalence of tuberculosis among Maoris. Dr. Turbott went to Samoa in 1935 as Chief Medical Officer, and inaugurated child welfare work there. He spent from 1935 to 1939 as Medical Officer of Health at Hamilton. While in the Waikato he organised a tuberculosis clinic for the Maoris and ran a_ diphtheria campaign under which approximately 11,000 children were protected. In 1940 he was appointed Director of the Division of School Hygiene, Health Department,

R. MURIEL E. BELL is a graduate of the Otago Medical School, where she also had 12 years’ teaching experience in the subjects of Physiology, Biochemistry and Experimental Pharmacology, followed by three years’ experience in hospital laboratory work in England and New Zealand. During three years’ tenure of a Scholarship of the Royal Society of Medicine for Medical Women of the British Empire, she did nutrition research at the Department of Biochemistry, University College. London, under Professor J. C. Drummond, who is now Scientific Advisor to the British Ministry of Food. In 1928, Dr. Bell married James Saunders (Dunedin) who died last year. During a trip abroad in 1928 she studied in Vienna and London, and on her return to New Zealand took up laboratory work at Napier Hospital. Research work in New Zealand has included work on the diagnosis of goitre in human cases and investigation of the deficiency disease known as "bush sickness" in animals. Dr. Muriel Bell was appointed as Nutritionist to the Department of Health in October, 1940. As this is a dual position, involving research work, she is stationed at Dunedin, where laboratory facilities are available at the Medical ° School, and where co-operation with the Home Science School is possible. The position also entails being called on for advice on dietetic matters in connection with schools, training colleges, hostels and hospitals, as well as routine nutritional problems of the Department of Health.