Tricks to Treat

Every year of her life, Brenda, 13, had been coming to St. Louis' Cardinal Glennon Memorial Hospital for Children, to have kidney tests. Terrified that new X-ray pictures would show her chronic condition to be getting worse, she lay rigidly on the examining table, her eyes brimming with tears. But she began to smile when Dr. Armand Brodeur, the hospital's chief of radiology, entered the room dressed in a smock covered with pictures of Snoopy and other characters from the Peanuts comic strip. Using the time-honored gestures of the magician to assure her that his hands were empty, Brodeur reached down and pulled a cotton ball from the child's ear, then made it disappear up his sleeve. Brenda relaxed.

Employing a combination of show business and sleight of hand to charm and relax his patients is routine for Brodeur, 51, who is both a radiologist and an active member of the Society of American Magicians. Aware that a hospital is a bewildering and often frightening place for a sick child, he has been trying, since assuming his position in 1959, to minimize children's fears by making "this place and myself not look Like a hospital."

Brodeur began by redecorating his department. He placed a sign reading ROENTGEN STREET (after the discoverer of X rays) in the corridor leading to the radiology unit. Bare hospital walls were covered with giant murals of characters from children's books and television programs-Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat, Charlie Brown and his friends, and the Flintstones. The X-ray machine was labeled "Batman's Superanalyzer," and nurses were given brightly colored smocks.

Most children-and their parents too-respond quickly to the lively decor of the radiology department. But it is Brodeur's magic that enables him to distract even the most fearful child. He pulls a string of brightly colored handkerchiefs out of an apparently empty fist, or makes his thumb disappear. Then, having coaxed a child into smiling, Brodeur rewards him; he whips red and black felt-tipped marking pens out of a pocket and draws a tiny ladybug on the patient's forearm.

Brodeur, whose own six children have performed in the magic shows he gives occasionally for charity organizations, believes that winning a child's confidence is crucial to good treatment. "You can do as much with a smile as with penicillin," he says. "When I do magic and paint halls and wear corny jackets, it's not because I haven't grown up. To stand tall in pediatrics you have to do it on your knees."

Other pediatricians apparently agree. Photos of Brodeur's decorations have been requested by dozens of hospitals from Canada to Australia, and several of his colleagues are getting Snoopy smocks of their own.

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