FOR MIND AND HANDS

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LXII, Issue 17, 4 March 1941, Page 4

FOR MIND AND HANDS

GENERAL HOSPITAL IN EGYPT

VALUE 'OF HOBBIES

(From the Official War Correspondent with the N.Z.E.F. in the Middle East).

EGYPT, February 6

In an attractively untidy room in the New Zealand General Hospital here, a bench is covered with halffinished model locomotives, mechanised toys and domestic articles, and t*here is a smell of paint and gluje 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 especially 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 ihis own initiative. 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 the not unusual sight of a soldier-pa-tient knitting, or doing some other form of handwork, as he lies in bed, and of a convalescent bending over a mechanical toy or a tabie lamp on a workshop bench. The satisfaction of making and achieving things is an experience common to all men. The patient w"ho 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 hand 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 selfrsupporting basis, and it is hoped that the work will be made a recognised branch of New Zealand military hospital activity.