CRIPPLED CHILDREN

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 120, 25 May 1925, Page 15

CRIPPLED CHILDREN

CARED FOR ON WIDE SCALE

REMARKABLE MOVEMENT EST ' AMERICA.

"The needs of the 460,000 or more crippled children in the United State 3 are at last in a fair way to receive full appreciation as a public health problem," states "The Nation's Health." "Town after town is organising to secure a census of their cnppie populations, State after State is opening its university hospitals for the care of indigent child and adult cripples. Rehabilitation -work, in industry and out, is being directed toward functional m well as physical restoration, and at least one agency is being organised on a nationwide basis to administer care on a decentralised plan designed to reclaim crippled children in the early stages of their deforming conditions.

"It remained for the Shriners' Hospital for Crippled Children to carry out the most comprehensive social project ever undertaken in the interest of the crippled child. Nearly five years ago, in Portland, the A.A.O.N.M.S. voted to create a hospital fund by the assessment of two dollars per capita on the entire membership for the purpose of establishing throughout tho country separate hospital units, under the general central direction, open to all crippled children -under the age of fourteen who would otherwise be unable to receive restorative treatment.

"It was distinctly a step forward that so important and so expensively organised a body should formally recognise that we must come early to the rescue of onr crippled children if we are to interfere effectually with deforming conditions. That real social vision as well as humanitarian impulse was at wort on the echemo was proved when the first step taken in the enterprise was to secure an effective liaison with leaders in the American Orthopoedic Association. To the essentials of orthopoedic care were then added co-operative relationships between surgeons, local physicians, educators, and field committees, so that no link in the chain of complete care has been neglected. The child to be restored to physical health is studied and trained, and the proper place found for him in his own community. Everywhere the hospitals have become organic centres for complete service to the crippled child. ST. LOUIS' HOSPITAL. The St. Louis Hospital for Crippled Children, the largest single unit of the Shriners' Hospitals, is described as typical of the services rendered. Opened in April, 1924, with Dr. Le Roy C. Abbott as chief surgeon, on 11th N.axch, the hospital had admitted 333 patients. Of those children, 242 have been discharged with their deformities corrected, 92 are now in the care of the hospital, and 98 children approved for admission are awaiting their turn to receive treatment.

"The spirit of recovery and rehabilitation pervades the place. Long, wide corridors offer cheerful vistas toward sunroom pavilions at the end. The broad, high windows preclude any shut-in feeling. The happy, interested children decry any restraint of hospital discipline. "The Shriners' institutions are in no sense places of refnge or of custodial care, but everywhere they emphasise restoration as an objective, with training facilities so adapted that the education of the child -patient is not interrupted during the prolonged periods of treatment sometimes necessary. At one end of each ward is a large open playroom. ihe other end opens upon outdoors pavilions, where the little patients may be exposed to open air and sunlight.

INFANTILE PARALYSIS.

"Infantile paralysis accounts for 50 per cent, of the patients of the St Louis Hospital. The hospitals as a whole show more than 60 per cent, are due to infantile paralysis. The 500 beds now m operation in the hospitals and the supplemental work of the mobile units are expected soon to serve 2000 children a year. "The problem of the cripple has never before been given the social perspective it is receiving in this soheme in an unbroken chain, with co-operation throughout, covering all parts of the country. The end if not yet, for other services are to be developed, but facilities to care for 2000 children a. year who formerly were 'hopeless cripples' for lack of a helping hand is a social achievement undreamed of ten years ago, and impossible except.to people of long-ran^e vision and enthusiasm.