1907 Plunket Society formed

The Society for the Promotion of the Health of Women and Children was founded at a meeting in the Dunedin Town Hall. It came to be known as the Plunket Society after its first patron, Lady Victoria Plunket, the wife of the governor.

The impetus for a society that would ‘help the mothers and save the babies’ came from Dr Frederic Truby King. In March 1907, while on the staff of the Mental Hospital at Seacliff, north of Dunedin, he contributed an article on child welfare to the Otago Daily Times. He believed that scientifically formulated doctrines on nutrition and infant care were the key to the future health of the nation. More immediately, they would help reduce the death rate among babies and children, which seemed to be escalating.

Later that year the Karitane Home for Babies opened in Dunedin. The first patients were tiny malnourished infants who had been gathered up by Truby King and his team and cared for at the Kings’ cottage in Karitane, near Seacliff. Six Karitane Hospitals were established to supplement home and clinic visits. These operated both as training bases for Karitane Nurses and as care units for babies who were failing to thrive. Dunedin’s Karitane-Harris Hospital became the sole training centre for Plunket Nurses.

By 1909 branches of the Plunket Society had been formed in each of the four main centres. In 1912, after a lecture tour by King, a further 60 branches were formed, each employing a Plunket Nurse.

Mothers were educated in practices of ‘domestic hygiene’ and ‘mothercraft’ that were based on King’s ideology, which stressed regularity of feeding, sleeping and bowel habits. The Plunket philosophy became parenting lore in New Zealand, and within three decades it was credited with giving this country the lowest infant mortality rate in the world.

Following his death in Wellington on 10 February 1938, King became New Zealand’s first private citizen to be honoured with a state funeral.