Pictures For Patients

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32072, 21 August 1969, Page 2

Pictures For Patients

(By

CAROLE LYDERS)

LONDON.

Bare hospital walls no matter how fresh and clean are not very enthralling to a patient , lying in bed too sick to read or be amused by radio programmes.

The obvious need is to hang pictures to bring a splash of colour and-life to patients, and also, perhaps, to cultivate a dormant appreciation of art. So thought a Red Cross member, Miss Millicent Buller, when she read of similar experiments carried out with success by the painter Adrian Hill and Sir Geoffrey Todd, when he was medical superintendent at King Edward VII Sanatorium, Midhurst, Sussex. And so was born the Red Cross Picture Library scheme now in its twenty-fifth year.

Today the library supplies 992 hospitals—chest, mental, orthopaedic, chronic sick, geriatric and general—and schools for the disabled. The numbers of hospitals and schools applying to join the scheme are growing at the rate of around 50 a year. Homebound Patients In addition pictures are available free of charge to homebound patients on the re-

commendation of a welfare officer.

The library has more than 18,000 prints ranging from the latest in pop and psychedelic art and abstracts to photo-graphic-like reproductions of animals, flowers and children. The latter are very popular with old people whose eyesight, not as good as it used to be, need clear-cut lines and bright colour. Top favourites, however are Constable, and the immpressionists, Renoir, Monet and Degas, and the Dutch artists who are famous for demestic interiors which people away from their homes find comforting. The object of the library is to give patients the opportunity of choosing pictures and broadening their horizons. The pictures make a practical contribution towards physical recovery and strengthen the will to get better. Many patients on their return home keep up their interest and quite a number have gone on to take up painting.