There's every chance you were a Plunket baby - more than 90% of New Zealanders were.
The not-for-profit trust is the biggest provider of health services to children from birth to 5 years and it is literally almost everywhere in New Zealand. The branch directory on its website runs to 167 pages.
The then medical superintendent of Seacliff Lunatic Asylum had garnered a reputation as an eccentric who chaffed against authority and pursued his own theories rather than falling in step with the medical establishment.
Mavericks have always held a certain attraction for New Zealanders, and it did not take the charismatic Dr King long to find supporters.
An early advocate, the governor’s wife Lady Victoria Plunket, lent her name to the organisation.
Plunket, then as now, relied on volunteers, and its inauguration came at a time when the citizenry was expected to be public-minded. Branches, sub-branches and Plunket rooms were set up the length of the country.
Dr King founded his own children’s hospital at Karitane, trained his own nurses, and wrote childcare manuals. His 1913 work Feeding and Care Of Baby was a best-seller and 1916’s The Expectant Mother and Baby’s First Months was given free to every marriage licence applicant.
Foreshadowing the "breast is best" slogan by decades, Dr King advocated mothers feed their own children, and for longer than was accepted practice at the time.He also promoted better hygiene and child visits, the forerunner of much of Plunket’s work today.
However, the original mission of the society was to "inculcate a lofty view of the responsibilities of maternity".
This they did through generations of strict, starched nurses who urged daunted parents to do it the Plunket way or add to the child mortality statistics.
Fusty, Edwardian and paternal Dr King’s views may have been, but his vision of scientific processes being applied to motherhood captured the spirit of the times.
Plunket was a fixture in every town landscape by the time Dr King died in 1938, and his reputation by now was saintly: he was the first private citizen to receive a state funeral, and in 1957 was the first New Zealander to have their portrait on a local postage stamp.
While his fame - and the institution he created - endures, many of Dr King’s edicts have fallen by the wayside.
Where once the Plunket nurse imposed a regime on parents which they were expected to follow, these days nurses implement a much more 21st-century-sounding "flexible partnership model of care and support".
Whatever the phraseology, the simple fact of free help on offer for struggling new parents has seen Plunket endure, and be treasured.
