wars in american history they say accidents in general over fifty million of us a year that means everybody gets injured once in about three years accidents cost a lot of money to ten or eleven billion dollars a year something like that over sixty dollars for each person in my family do accidents just happen i ought to know the answer i've seen the results of enough of them i remember fred taylor's case called in that the office told him their baby daughter had a high fever are these flowers for the child no she's ok with flowers or for a friend he panicked trip fell down stairs and broke his leg what really caused fred's accident i walked a long ways thinking about that the stairs fred tangled with were just an ordinary flight of stairs i can't blame them for the accident it was anxiety for these child it kept is natural safeguards from operating automatic things like walking in city things he did every day without thinking stop being automatically safe is signals got mixed up and called that that course not every real cause of an accident is as obvious as fred's fear for his little girl's health i remember last spring i had a night car as i drove to the patient's home i thought another accident caused this one mixed up the worried wife took me to her husband he was a do it yourself there and had cut his finger in his home workshop i fixed him up and looked around the house was a mess but life was really fat the kids well they sure looked like an epidemic of accidents i got interested in this family the way things worked out for them makes me sort of proud of myself it wasn't easy because here in this one family there were all kinds of reasons emotional physical social physiological reasons the mother or overweight condition was the symptom of an emotional problem the t tried to forget by overeating i finally got her to understand this and was able to help her she looks and feels fine now and her husband that was simple after i got him to have his eyes checked he looks at the world a whole lot better with his new glasses those kids know accidents lately there wasn't anything really wrong with them after  mom and dad were taken care of this is an accident free family now so many accidents come from physical disabilities poor hearing poor eyesight disease old age and emotional disturbances that made fred taylor's signals get crossed up like that other patient to almost cut his finger off on his homework chop saw same accident as the father who needed glasses but a different reason this fella had an argument with his neighbor made him mad and ano accident then there are loads of things the experts call physiological factors medicines for hay fever and allergies tranquilizers we need to study these things we need a lot more research there are thousands of facts we've got to learn before we understand how to prevent accidents in a systematic successful way million of dollars spent in the united states on medical research every year now accident provenge us to get its share we got to tackle this problem the way polio was tackled the way heart disease is being tackled research that the answer to all this needless waste of lives in the meantime what about me i know i sometimes drive too fast and i take chances i don't always try to figure out what the other  going to do i must work harder at this i must get seatbelts for the car be twice as safe and  overloaded wiring burned out a fuse last night tried to get a wrong with matches burned my fingers hit my ankle on the chair almost set the house on fire are not a sims at home are they safely out of the kid's reach the engine the asked his mother for the car tonight was it right to let him have it you never did get to take that driver training classes