Abstract
No authority irritated Australian experts more than the colonial world expert on babies, New Zealand’s Dr Frederic Truby King (1858–1938). Zealous to the point of being fanatical, in reality he knew little about babies. His talents were as a prose-lytiser and he acquired adherents and antagonists whenever he ventured from home. He made his country a model for Australia in the infant welfare crusade in the 1920s, heedless of the constraint that New Zealand, as the country with the best performance in infant mortality, only set an appropriate example if the relevant conditions which had spelled success were equally present in Australia.1
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Notes
On his wife’s work see Mein Smith, ‘Isabella Truby King’, in C. Macdonald et al. (eds), Book of New Zealand Women, pp. 354–6.
Quoted in Linda Bryder, ‘Perceptions of Plunket: Time to Review Historians’ Interpretations?’, in L. Bryder and D. Dow (eds), New Countries and Old Medicine, conference proceedings 1994, Auckland, 1995, p. 99.
Gordon Parry, A Fence at the Top: The First 75 Years of the Plunket Society, Dunedin, 1982, p. 47.
See, for example, Ann Dally, Inventing Motherhood, London, 1982.
‘Obituary’ NZMJ, vol. 37, no. 198, April 1938, p. 96.
Mary Truby King, Truby King the Man, London, 1948, p. 208, and
Barbara L. Brookes, ‘Frederic Truby King and the Seacliff Asylum’, in H. Attwood, R. Gillespie and M. Lewis (eds), New Perspectives on the History of Medicine, 1st national conference of Aust. Society of History of Medicine 1989, Melbourne, 1990, p. 6.
Truby King, The Story of the Teeth and How to Save Them, Auckland, 1935 (1st published 1917), p. 3.
Truby King, The Feeding of Plants and Animals, Wellington, 1905, p. 5.
Truby King, Save the Babies, Auckland, 1917, p. 5;
Truby King, ‘Eugenics’, TAMC, 1914, pp. 83–4.
J.W. Barrett, The Necessity for the Practical Application of Available Knowledge, Melbourne, 1914, p. 7
subsequently quoted by Truby King in A Plea for the Drawing Up and Circulation Throughout the Whole Community of Simple Reliable Consistent Standards for Guidance in the Rearing of Normal Infants, Victoria League, Report of Proceedings of Imperial Health Conference, 1914, p. 10;
Erik Olssen, ‘Truby King and the Plunket Society: An Analysis of a Prescriptive Ideology’, NZ Journal of History, vol. 15, no. 1, April 1981, pp. 3–23.
M. Liddiard, The Mothercraft Manual, London, 1924;
Liddiard’s version of the Truby King code is discussed in J. Newson and E. Newson, ‘Cultural Aspects of Childrearing in the English-speaking World’, in M.P.M. Richards (ed.), The Integration of a Child into a Social World, Cambridge, 1974, pp. 59–63
Prescriptions for British mothers generally are reviewed in C. Hardyment, Dream Babies: Child Care from Locke to Spock, London, 1983
and C. Irwin and E. Sharland, ‘From Bodies to Minds in Childcare Literature’, in R. Cooter (ed.), In the Name of the Child: Health and Welfare 1880–1940, London, 1992, ch. 7.
Truby King, ‘Physiological Economy’, NZMJ, vol. 6, no. 24, November 1907, p. 89.
A. Cochrane, ‘King, Sir (Frederic) Truby’, Dictionary of National Biography, London, 1949.
J.W. Dunbar Hooper, Infant Mortality. Second International Congress of the Society for the Protection of Child Life, Brussels, 1907, Australian Medical Pamphlets, vol. 25, NLA;
Armstrong, ‘The Infant Welfare Movement in Australia’, MJA, 28 October 1939, pp. 643, 647–8.
Ailsa Burns, ‘Population Structure and the Family’, in Ailsa Burns, Gill Bottomley and Penny Jools (eds), The Family in the Modern World: Australian Perspectives, Sydney, 1983, p. 53;
Useful biographical sources on Helen Mayo are Alison Mackinnon, The New Women: Adelaide’s Early Women Graduates, Adelaide, 1986, pp. 60–72;
South Australian Medical Women’s Society, The Hands of a Woman: Stories of South Australian Medical Women and their Society, Adelaide, 1994, pp. 36–45.
Kerreen Reiger, ‘Vera Scantlebury Brown: Professional Mother’, in M. Lake and F. Kelly (eds), Double Time, Ringwood, Vic, 1985, ch. 31.
Vera Scantlebury Brown, A Guide to Infant Feeding, 1st edition, Melbourne, 1929, pp. 3–4, 6–7, 8, Alfred Derham Papers, 5/7–5/8;
Muriel A. Peck, Your Baby: A Practical Guide to Mothers and Nurses, Melbourne, 1929, p. 23.
also Margaret Harper, The Parents’ Book, Sydney, 1926, p. 69
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© 1997 Philippa Mein Smith
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Smith, P.M. (1997). Prophets, Lady Doctors and Prescriptions. In: Mothers and King Baby. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14304-7_5
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