Word: spastics
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...epidemic of encephalitis which broke out in 1941 in North Dakota, Minnesota, Manitoba and Saskatchewan the 2,792 cases were mainly among farmers and others who handle horses. About 12% of the victims died. Many others were left with damaged minds and spastic muscles since encephalitis-like poliomyelitis (infantile paralysis)-primarily attacks the nervous system...
...with certain motor centres of his brain seriously damaged. If he matures, his central nervous system remains in an infantile state, like a telephone switchboard with crossed wires. Bombarded by sense impulses, he always gets the wrong number-brings the wrong muscles into play. Such children are victims of spastic paralysis. In walking, their toes scrape the ground, their legs cross in a scissors bend, and the touch of a finger may send them sprawling...
Although some of them drool like idiots, spastic children are usually of normal intelligence. Neither medicine nor surgery can cure them. Chief hope for them is to train the healthy fibres of the brain to take over the functions of injured sections. Shining example of such a self-helped spastic is Dr. Earl Reinhold Carlson- of Manhattan's Neurological Institute. Son of Swedish immigrants, iron-willed Dr. Carlson worked his way through the University of Minnesota and Princeton. A group of friends sent him to Yale Medical School. He has started a dozen schools for spastics all over...
Physical training just for "motion's sake" is useless. To develop, muscles must be used for a purpose. Spastic children must be sent to school as soon as possible, must not have their lessons done for them, for they learn only by experience. Writing, or typing, is very important, for muscular movements somehow help to fix facts in the spastic's brain...
...Ranchman Gill's horse threw him. Three months later, in Washington, D. C., Richard Gill was flat on his back and rigid with spastic (muscle-contracting) paralysis. He remained on his back for four years. Doctors had no drug to combat his condition. One "eminent specialist" said that curare (pronounced koo-rah-reh), which contains a muscle-relaxing principle, might help. But U. S. doctors had never been able to get enough pure curare to experiment with its properties...