Magic & Mickey Mouse

A psychiatrist who teaches parlor magic and a psychiatrist who measures the smiles of patients last week solemnly reported on their work.

Thimbles, Cards and Rope. Psychiatrist Douglas McGlashan Kelley, who is director of the psychopathic ward in San Francisco Hospital, teaches simple tricks to victims .of certain mental diseases. His theory: patients who have withdrawn into themselves from shyness, inferiority complexes or mild schizophrenia (split personality) can become the life of the party if they are taught parlor magic. The tricks they learn, said Dr. Kelley, "require no brains and can't go wrong."

Sample stunts: making a thimble vanish; matching cards picked by a spectator; "cutting" ropes and putting them together again. Dr. Kelley's prize patient is a salesman who developed a fear of talking to people, had to quit his job. After six weeks of training, Dr. Kelley got him to perform three tricks at a patients' party. A few weeks later he was completely cured.

"Look at the Birdie!" At Manhattan's Academy of Medicine Dr. John Galloway Lynn, Dr. Kelley's friend, delivered a paper on "Mimetic smiledness as related to handedness: an indicator of basic modes of human adaptation." He described his "smilometer," a wooden box almost five feet long filled with machinery as intricate as a Rube Goldberg invention. At one end an oval opening is cut out for a patient to insert his face. Inside the box is: I) a time clock; 2) a movie projector which reels off Mickey Mouse or The Ugly Duckling on a small translucent screen; 3) a concealed motion-picture camera which takes shots of the patient's smiles.

After the show is over, Dr. Lynn runs off the film, stopping it every few seconds to chart facial expressions. So far, he has tested about 150 mental patients. He found:

Patients who have "lefthandedness and smiledness," or "right-handedness and smiledness," are aggressive, outgoing, courageous. Those who have handedness on one side and smiledness on the other, are shy, retiring, fearful, lack initiative.

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