WORK FOR MIND AND HAND

Dominion, Volume 34, Issue 135, 4 March 1941, Page 7

WORK FOR MIND AND HAND

General Hospital In Egypt

(From The N.Z.E.F. Official War

Cobrespondent. )

CAIRO, February 6.

In an attractively untidy room in the New Zealand General Hospital, a bench is covered with half-finished model locomotives, mechanized toys, and domestic articles, and there is a smell of paint and glue in, the air. This little workshop is a 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. Firstly, there are those who are confined to bed for long periods, and whose minds tend to become “stale" through the monotony of inaction. This tendency is specially real in the life of a-soldier, since even out of hospital his normal routine, in periods of training at least, gives him little scope for the exercising of his own intiative. Secondly, there are the patients suffering from mental stress and disorders, whose condition may only be worsened 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 Ibe not unusual sight of a soldier-patient knitting, or doing some other form of handwork. us lie lies in bed, and of a convalescent bending over a mechanical toy or a table lamp on a workshop bench. The satisfaction of making and achieving tilings is an experience common to all men. The patient who Is menaced by monotony no longer watches the weary hours drag by;, the man who has been mentally upset looks at the thing he has built with a glow of satisfaction and returning faith in himself; the injured soldier who has to make his left hand do what his right band did before, feels an inward pride at the progress lie is making. The sale of the toys and other articles made by the men puts occupational therapy on a self-supporting basis, and it is hoped that the work will be made a recognized branch of New Zealand military hospital activity.