Word: pais
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...young Cornell man named Hu Shih got a ducking. To memorialize the immersion, a soaking compatriot composed a poem in literary Chinese. Its mannered, delicate style seemed so ill-suited to the topic that young Hu dashed off some lustier lines of his own. They were written in Pai Hua (the living speech) instead of Wen Li (the literary language), and they were good. Until Hu did it, no one believed that serious literature could be made from, Pai Hua, as Dante had from Italian...
...these prescriptions are wrong, a British expert now reports. M. Narasimha Pai, an Indian-born psychiatrist attached to Britain's Mill Hill and Sutton Emergency Hospitals, has decided that previous investigators were misled by the name of the disease, which is also known as "scrivener's palsy." Writer's cramp, he says, has nothing to do with writers or writing fatigue; it is a symptom of neurosis and may attack anybody...
...British Journal of Mental Science, Pai reports that he has found writer's cramp surprisingly widespread in Britain.* He examined 1,880 psychoneurotic British soldiers and found that 171 had writer's cramp. Only six, all clerks, had done a good deal of writing. Most of the patients developed their symptoms upon being assigned to uncongenial jobs that required some writing...
...patients were really ill, thinks Pai, and were not just trying a fancy dodge. Cramped writers, he observed, fall into two distinct classes: 1) the tremulous type, whose writing is wavering, generally suffered from severe anxiety, 2) spastic (pinched) or ataxic (jerky) writers were suffering from hysterical neuroses...
Following through on his clues, Pai was able to relax writing cramps in short order. His treatment was drastic psychotherapy-sedatives and insulin for anxious patients, hypnotic suggestion for the hysterical...