MECHANISED TOYS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 52, 3 March 1941, Page 5

MECHANISED TOYS.

MADE BY N.Z. SOLDIERS. HOSPITAL INNOVATION. 1 (From Mr. Robin T. Miller, Official War Correspondent with the N.Z.E.F. in the Middle East.) EGYPT, February 6. | 111 an attractively untidy room in the New Zealand General Hospital, a bench is covered with half-finished model locomotives, mechanised toys and domestic] I articles, and there is a smell of paint and glue in the air. This little workshop is the home of an activity which the medical officers call "occupational therapy," but which might more simply be termed exercise of the mind and the hands.

Doctors find that there are three classes of hospital patients who may derive remarkable benefits when they| are given constructive work of this sort to do. There are those who are conI lined to bed for long periods and whose minds tend to become, "stale" through the monotony of inaction. Secondly, there are the patients suffering from mental stress and disorders whose condition may only be made worse by idleness; and, thirdly, in a much different |class, those who have lost the use of certain muscle groups as a result of injury or possibly amputation.

Those are the facts, behind the not uii- | usual sight of a soldier-patient knittinir |Or doing some other form of handwork as he lies in bed, and of a convalescent bending over a mechanical toy on a [workshop bench. The eale of the toys and other articles made by the men puts occupational therapy on a self-sup-porting basis, and it is hoped that the work will lip made a reeo<rni-=p<l branch of New Zealand military hospital activity. j