For the Disabled

Ten years ago, Betsey Barton was having the kind of good time only American girls of her background can have. She was 16, pretty, athletic, and the daughter of a rich father, famed Advertising Man Bruce Barton. She rode horseback, danced, played tennis, toured the world. Then she broke her back in an automobile accident. In spite of all that surgery could do, her legs remained paralyzed.

This week, in And Now to Live Again (D. Appleton-Century, $1.75), Betsey Barton describes how a badly maimed person feels after the first shock of injury has passed, how such a person can make the agonizingly slow mental adjustment, sometimes more difficult than that of people deformed at birth. She hopes that her book will help teach the families of wounded men what to expect, what to do.

She intended to write an objective account of clinics, exercises, psychiatric treatments for the millions who have been badly hurt (besides the unknown number of disabled veterans, the U.S. has 4,000,000 handicapped people, acquires 800,000 new ones a year, of whom 90,000 are injured in industry). But what she produced was a moving description of her gradually victorious state of mind.*

Slow Beginning. Betsey Barton lay in bed for a year doing nothing, growing feebler & feebler. Recently she has visited people "who sit in back bedrooms . . . because rescue work was not brought to them...." Rescue, she says, should begin the minute danger is over, or there will be a "serious psychic lesion which may result in total paralysis of the will." The trick is "never give food that is too strong for the weak-tea capacity," never assign a task at which the injured may fail--they may give up altogether. The Army's new rehabilitation program with its graduated exercises (TIME, Nov. 15, 1943) works on this principle. Betsey Barton's own first calisthenics were breathing and moving her abdominal muscles. Her first occupation was learning to type on a machine slung over her bed on a board. She now gets around, slowly, on crutches, can even stand on her head. Since learning to type, she has written for Redbook and Liberty magazines, the Washington Times-Herald and other publications.

"Terrifying World." A patient, she thinks, should get out of the hospital as soon as possible, even though it means entering a "new and terrifying world." She also feels that he should get no coddling, should learn to do things for himself, even when it seems harsh to make him do them. The best kind of help, she found, is from someone similarly injured. Betsey Barton made this discovery at Manhattan's unique Institute for the Crippled and Disabled.* There she found an organization with many disabled people on its staff, using many kinds of special training methods. For example, there are replicas of bus steps, curbs placed just the width of a city street apart, with lights timed like traffic lights. Hardest trick for Betsey Barton was getting into a cab.

Cooperation Wanted. Betsey Barton can now take care of herself entirely. She can even cook from a wheel chair (keeping pots & pans in bottom drawers instead of top ones) and mop ("not too clean, of course").

Much help for the disabled, she believes, should be provided by the community :

P:Centers similar to New York's Institute should be established all over the U.S.

P:Trained physical therapists and occupational therapists are needed by the thousands.

P:Most present-day appliances for crip, pled people, including her own braces, are "medieval," says Betsey Barton.

* Facilities for disabled are listed in another book, out this week: Normal Lives for the Disabled (Macmillan, $2.50) by Edna Yost in collaboration with Dr. Lillian Moller Gilbreth who, with her husband, late Dr. Frank B. Gilbreth, developed many industrial jobs for handicapped men after World War I. * For those who need it, the Institute offers job training. There are over 2,000 kinds of jobs that handicapped people can fill, 275 of them for people with arm injuries. The value of such people to industry is beginning to be appreciated (TIME, June 21, 1943).

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