Word: spastic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...would seem so unnecessary were doctors permitted to put these little spastic and other hopelessly deformed babies to sleep at time of birth. Why permit them to live-when by so doing, they become later an agony to themselves...
Your write-up of the murder of Virginia Braunsdorf disturbs and disgusts me. You give the impression that a spastic is a hopeless case for which death is the logical, if illegal, solution. You should have at least investigated the records on cerebral palsy, the technical term for spasticity...
...Many spastics have achieved distinction in various fields, and most of them, like most other people, are of normal mentality . . . I know whereof I speak. I am a spastic. " VASSAR MILLER
...years after the birth of his child, Detroit Symphony Musician Eugene Braunsdorf did everything in his power to make her happy and comfortable. It was a heartbreaking task; Virginia was a spastic child, and grew slowly into a helpless parody of womanhood. At 21, she was only four feet tall, could not hold her head upright, and talked in gobbling sounds which only her father could understand...
Dressed in black, she began to dance in jerky, spastic movements-in anguish, as the program notes explained, for the besieged Israelites whose water supply had been cut off by Holofernes. When she got ready to visit the confident enemy, she stripped off her black "garments of mourning," decked herself with jewels and sidled forth clad in beige "garments of gladness." Composer Schuman's music took on a sinister cast, Dancer Graham a sinuous, Salome-ish look. The final victory dance, after Judith had whacked off the imaginary Holofernean head, was wildly exultant and percussive...