Word: spastic
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Parisians were bewildered because the monkish composer, a devout, 38-year-old Catholic, punctuates his pious music with bird calls and Hindu rhythms. Instead of repose, listeners felt spastic jerkiness; instead of exalting sonorities, they heard grinding dissonance. After a performance of his Three Short Liturgies of the Divine Presence, which is scored (among other things) for a xylophone and two dried gourds with rattling seeds, one Paris critic snorted: "African witchcraft rather than Christian music...
...world had changed; even Paris had changed. And one must be so careful these days; Maxim's manager, uncertain of volatile Parisian reactions, had drawn tight the forbidding metal blinds of the war years. Over the threshold of pleasure, a single electric bulb, flickering with Paris' spastic electric current, lighted strayed revelers through the night...
Since last winter when young (33), heavy-set Dr. Kabat began treating such spastic cases, as a Saturday afternoon sideline in his front parlor, his clinic has grown until it now takes all his time. His eight therapists and 50 patients have crowded his wife and three children right out of the house...
...Kabat is convinced that most spastics can be helped (although curing them is impossible). He first got on the track of spastic therapy when he worked with Sister Elizabeth Kenny (see below) at the University of Minnesota in 1942. Kabat, a boy wonder who got his Ph.D. from Northwestern at 22, was then an instructor in physiology. He discovered that prostigmine, which had been used chiefly to relieve post-operational gas pains, relieved muscular and nervous tension in polio victims, helped physical therapy to create new habit patterns...
Prostigmine & Education. The aim of spastic therapy, Dr. Kabat explains, is to gain "voluntary control of muscles through a part of the brain which hasn't been injured." This is a difficult, slow process, because "it is trying to make the uninjured part of the brain learn to do something it wasn't planned to do." Prostigmine makes it easier by: 1) increasing the amount of acetylcholine, a body chemical which stimulates nervous and mental activity; 2) relaxing and strengthening the muscles...