Bad Boy

When Harold Arnold, 14, who lives with his parents on an old houseboat at Edgewater, N. J., entered school this term he proved himself a very bad boy. He chased his teacher about the room with a long, heavy stick until she jumped on a desk, screaming for help. He threw blackboard erasers and handfuls of chalk at teachers and pupils. One day he caught another pupil and banged his head on a concrete floor. Another time he chased frantic children with a rusty, 8-in. knife. He rubbed poison ivy on the faces of several pupils too weak to escape him, and then on his own face.

Harold's teacher was unusually sensible. She realized that when he was on one of his wanton sprees he was "beside himself," beyond his own volition. Harold said that his head always "hurt" him. She took the boy to a psychoanalyst, who confessed that he could work no cure.

Then Dr. Charles Frederick Buckley, school physician, recognized Harold's rubbing poison ivy on his own face as a symptom of hypo-pituitarianism. When the pituitary gland is underdeveloped the victim is subject to convulsive seizures. These fits differ from those caused by brain infections or other cranial maldevelopments in that they are apt to be erratic and to manifest themselves viciously. They appear with adolescence. Endocrinologists have discovered that young hypo-pituitarians, if untreated, become very fat, sexually undeveloped. This boy was just beginning to manifest those marks. But five to ten grains of sheep's pituitary gland fed hypo-pituitarians daily can cure. That was what Dr. Buckley started to do last week, after the Edgewater Board of Education had reluctantly (because it feared legal complications) voted him $50 for Harold's treatment. But this socially intelligent medication the boy's parents, the houseboat dwellers, suddenly and in their legal right decided to forbid.

Social therapeutics such as Bad Boy Arnold needs came before the National Association of Police & Fire Surgeons and the Medical Directors of Civil Service Commissions when they convened in Manhattan last week. Dr. Samuel B. Hadden, associate neurologist of the Philadelphia Department of Public Safety, reminded his associates that inflammation of the brain is a frequent cause of children's misdemeanors, that they often develop anti-social tendencies and lose their sense of responsibility, with little or no impairment of their other mental faculties. Such children may develop into "master criminals." Dr. Hadden advised that they be sent to special training schools, but not to asylums.

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