Tightrope Doctor

From the hazards of embryonic life or the rough passage of birth, one out of some 1,000 children emerges with certain motor centres of his brain seriously damaged. If he matures, his central nervous system remains in an infantile state, like a telephone switchboard with crossed wires. Bombarded by sense impulses, he always gets the wrong number--brings the wrong muscles into play. Such children are victims of spastic paralysis. In walking, their toes scrape the ground, their legs cross in a scissors bend, and the touch of a finger may send them sprawling.

Although some of them drool like idiots, spastic children are usually of normal intelligence. Neither medicine nor surgery can cure them. Chief hope for them is to train the healthy fibres of the brain to take over the functions of injured sections. Shining example of such a self-helped spastic is Dr. Earl Reinhold Carlson-- of Manhattan's Neurological Institute. Son of Swedish immigrants, iron-willed Dr. Carlson worked his way through the University of Minnesota and Princeton. A group of friends sent him to Yale Medical School. He has started a dozen schools for spastics all over the U. S., has helped 8,000 fellow sufferers to control their unruly muscles. This week, in a pithy little book (Born That Way; John Day; $1.75), he tells the story of his struggles.

Earl Carlson was born in Minneapolis during the blizzard of 1897. He was injured by forceps, and still bears a scar on his forehead. He had to crawl on all fours till he was five, but was robust and mischievous. One day, to his mother's amazement, little Earl's flailing arms stole some apples from a fruit stand. "It was the first time that my hand had ever done my bidding," he said. "My stolen apples gave me the clue, not followed up for years, that the secret of control for the muscularly handicapped lies in concentration on a purpose."

Because his parents were poor, Earl was not coddled. When he was six, his mother "drove" him to school, where he suffered agonies. Grasping a pencil was for him what tightrope walking is to a normal man. Although he dared not eat in public till he was 18 or 19, he once picked the lock of his cousin's Model-T Ford with a hairpin, drove carefully around the block. In 1918, while he was at college, Earl's mother died and the following year his father killed himself. Instead of going to pieces, the crippled orphan boy matured overnight. Today Dr. Carlson, happily married, spends summers in Manhattan and Long Island, winters in his school at Pompano, Fla. He speaks slowly, writes in a sprawling hand, but dances, swims, paddles a canoe, is a good shot. Dr. Carlson deplores pampering for spastics, insists that only the rigors of life can teach them to teach themselves control. His chief maxim:

Physical training just for "motion's sake" is useless. To develop, muscles must be used for a purpose. Spastic children must be sent to school as soon as possible, must not have their lessons done for them, for they learn only by experience. Writing, or typing, is very important, for muscular movements somehow help to fix facts in the spastic's brain.

* No kin to Chicago's famed Physiologist Anton Julius Carlson (TIME, Feb. 10).

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