PLUNKET SOCIETY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 935, 12 July 1957, Page 11

PLUNKET SOCIETY

Sir,-"Sundowner’ in a recent issue wrote: "It is good for farmers and everyone else to be under observation and criticism." No doubt the Plunket Society will welcome the interest in its work shown by your reviewer R.D.McE. and your correspondent D.G. Were they to witness the activities of thousands of voluntary’ workers throughout the country; were they to see groups of young fathers in rural districts helping to build up-to-date clinics for the use of the Plunket nurses and for the benefit of their wives and children; were they to follow the medical adviser, Dr Neil Begg, in his campaign up and down the country in a determined attack on hydatids; or were they to acquaint themselves with the Society’s constant work in the prevention of accidents in the home, I am sure they would not fear the "danger of inertia." Our. critics also deplored Dr Truby King’s "wholly physical concept of health." Yet it was claimed that more cures were effected at Seacliff. under Dr King than at any other asylum then south of the Equator. It is hard to believe that a lecturer in Mental Science at the University of Otago could have a "wholly -physical concept of health." The frieze round the old room in which

he taught reiterated the Latin tag "Mens sana in corpore sano." Later in life he wrote: "Great injury may be done to the nervous system in childhood, especially in the first two years when the brain grows very rapidly. Normal development of the nervous system demands quiet handling, regularity, the maximum of sleep and freedom from undue excitement." Long before Dr Grantly Dick Read’s excellent suggestions were published, Dr Truby King had stressed the possible dangers of surgical birth and urged mothers to prepare pre-natally for healthy natural delivery and, of course, breast feeding. In the early days of the Plunket Society Dr King had to fight ignorance, indifference, infantile diarrhoea, rickets, scurvy, and malnutrition generally. There was not much point in talking psychology when there was a tremendous infant mortality through physical causes. Once the first battle was won, and when the late Dr Helen Deem began her long and distinguished career as medical adviser to the Plunket Society, she was able to devote her energies to psychological problems. After years of research in this field, the Society, with the co-operation of the Kindergarten Association, established a Pre-School Education Centre in Dunedin. Advances in psychology and nutrition led Dr Deems constantly to revise Plunket policy. To her, "inertia" was anathema. One of her important reforms was the appointment of special "breast-feeding" sisters in State maternity homes. New Zealand’s mothers and _ babies still need the Plunket Society to protect them, not only from physical illness, accidents on tractors and scalding from hot-water jugs, but also from the spate of child psychology publications and cheap psychiatry that are having disastrous effects on family life in some areas abroad.

M.O.

D.

. (Invercargill).