ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Diagnosis and postnatal care: The Plunket Society, Dr Truby King, and eugenic ideology in early twentieth century Aotearoa New Zealand

• In Event: Diagnosing Difference in Biomedicine

English Abstract

In 1906, Dr Truby King, a physician and health policy reformer in Aotearoa New Zealand, visited a newborn named Thomas Rangiwahia Mutu Ellison. His mother had difficulty breastfeeding, so King and his wife took the child into their care and devised a regimented program of exclusively formula feeding, sleeping, and excreting “by the clock”. Mutu recovered and was returned to his family. In 1914, King cofounded The Plunket Society, which advocated for professional nursing for mothers and babies across New Zealand. In this talk I argue that King’s efforts forging novel diagnostic categories and treatments for infants and mothers through the Plunket Society pushed emerging eugenic ideologies into public postnatal discourse.

Dr. King saw an increasing standard of living among New Zealanders producing children who became self-indulgent and devoid of moral self-control. King believed this degeneration could be reversed through instilling values of self-sufficiency from infancy. Plunket policies followed suit. Plunket’s 1917 ‘Save the Babies Week’ claimed: “the Race marches forward on the feet of Little Children”. In 1925 King wrote in a Plunket publication, that, “lack of control… underlies all weakness of character”. In 1927 they claimed to promote “a race of capable, efficient children – strong, healthy, and resistive to disease.” Through the Plunket Society, lack of self-control in infants became a medically legitimated and treatable condition. We can explain this rise of diagnostic and treatment categories in New Zealand public postnatal discourse by demonstrating how they were deeply informed by colonial eugenic ideologies on racial degeneration and suicide.

Author

• Rose Gatfield-Jeffries, University of Pittsburgh