NATIONAL HYGIENE.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXX, Issue 3579, 19 July 1912, Page 2

NATIONAL HYGIENE.

MEDICAL ASPECTS OF EDUCATION. LECTURE BY DR. TRUBY KING. A lecture was delivered in the Wellington Concert Chamber oil Saturday last by Dr. Truby King, medical superintendent of Seacliff Mental Hospital, on certain medical aspects of education. The statement made by Dr. King was primarily for the benefit of the Education Commission, but the commission invited teachers and others interested to attend. The speaker said that the first thing he wished to draw attention to is the grave effects which neglect of rational hvgiene—the laws and needs of healthy habit and healthy. living, over-studv, competitive examinations, and so-called competitions—are haying on tlie rising generation, especially on girls. The Case of Growing Girls. At the annual general meeting in Auckland, held in March, 16 months ago, he gave an address on “The Factors Bearing on Motherhood under the conditions of Modern Civilisation as affecting the Race.” Dr. Savage, the president, and a number of other doctors sooke in the same direction, saying how frequently they were called on in practice to deal with cases of nervous broftkdov.n unci functidiitil irregularities of organs associated with more or less development, arrest, brought- on by lack of rational hygiene and injudicious and unnecessary education stress —that is to say, arrest of proper nutrition, grow tin and development, involving not only the whole organism, more or less, hut falling especially on those parts of the growing girl which it- is the scheme of creation to develoo and expand at the very neriod of life when the stress of our educational system is making itself most felt. In such cases, the president said he was in the habit of advising that the pupil should be takei a wav from school for a whole year; indeed,’ he said he was inclined to think that were it feasible it- would be a good thing for all girls if they could he relieved from the stress of ordinary education as now conducted, at this critical expanding and rapid-lv-growing neriod of life. Education as it Appeals to the Physician. The lecturer explained that it was his intention to deal not so much with the details of ordinary education as with its broader and move essential aspects, hearing on the- development and future health and fitness of the individual, physical, mental, arid moral. He was not specially concerned with immediate school results. Id other words he wished to deal with education as it appealed to the physician, and he made no apology for commencing with a few simple experiments' suitable for demonstrating to a, child and proving that we live at the bottom of an ocean which is just as material and substantial as the ocean in which fish live, only that the aerial fluid happens to be thinner. Ninety per cent of people did not believe that air was anything— or at anyrate. anything of importance. He could come to no other conclusion from the fact that they abhorred open windows, especially -open bedroom windows. Education took no account of air as a food; indeed, lie might almost say that the higher our education the less seemed to be tho recognition of the need tor a constant and abundant supply of pure air—tho first of all essentials for health. Education talked glibly about carbonic acid gas and fifteen pounds pressure on the square inch, but it did not bring homo to the child that it could live for forty days without food, but only fotir minutes without air. A child could be intensely interested in such matters if they were properly presented. The books generally used in our schools for teaching physiology were utterly unfit for the purpose—infinitely dry and filled with a mass of uninteresting and unimportant details.