Evening star., 1938-10-25
CR0QUET HELPS
RETURN SANITY
Games Which Give Patient
Sense Of Importance
Hailed by Doctors.

Croquet has its uses-and all the
midget golf courses that blossomed on
vacant city lots a few years ago are
not In junk piles.
Some of them have been salvaged
for mental hospitals where it has
been found. the game which millions
OF Americans played for a summer Is
well adapted for some very deterio-
rated types Of patients. 1t is just with
in the range OF their intelligence al
though, if the treatment works, they
soon grow out of it and take up more
virile sports, requiring a little more
intelligence.
And croquet has survived the 10th
century not only as a game but as a
remedy for cases Of the widespread
mental disease. dementia praecox,
which are very far gone. At the
psychopathic Hospital of the United
States Veterans Administration at
Perryville. Md, IL years ago was a
veteran who sat around all day with
out moving or speaking, refusing to
eat and completely buried in grave
like dream The doctors managed to
get him walking around the grounds,
where he was induced to play croquet.
Today he is the bona fide croquet
champion of Maryland, gives lessons
on the finer points of the game and is
about ready to leave the hospital and
support himself.
Competitive Interest.
exhibit prepared for the Academy of
Physical Medicine meeting here by
Drs. Duncan J. Campbell and John
A. Davis of the Perryville staff. The
idea was. they said, to get their pa
tlent to do something which required
no thinking, but which provided
enough competitive interest to keep
him at it. Croquet is game of single
moves with one objective at a time.
When the fellow became the cham
pion Of his ward. he was we'll on his
way back to sanity.
Other patients in the same condi-
ton, they said. had been markedly
benefited by midget golf, which also
requires no brain effort 1t would
probably work, they admit, only in a
very few cases where they had the
good luck to get the patients started.
The theory is that dementia prae-
cox operates in a vicious circle. The
more the patient deteriorates the less
~ tn ln III, T.
reaches the point where he shows no
interest whatsoever in life and re-
fuses to feed or dress himself. The
less he does the more he gets out of
the habit of doing anything. The
habit of doing something must be
rebuilt in his badly deteriorated brain.
Swimming of Value.
One exercise which has proved Of
considerable value is swimming Even
IN the most deteriorated cases there Is
the deeply buried instinct of self
preservation, which comes into play
when one feels himself sinking in
water The praecox victim struggles
to keep afioat and in this way builds
up habits of movement again which
can be transferred to other activities.
He is, of course, closely watched in
the tank so that he will not drown,
but rescue seldom is necessary.
At Perryville are some very violent
patients with homicidal tendencies. It
has been found perfectly safe, however.
to allow them to play baseball and
hae st %,ia
crack another's skull with a bat. A
bat, or any other lethal weapon, could
not be allowed in such mans hands
When game was not in progress. The
theory is that the hatred of mankind
which dominates such man is
finds its vent in home runs instead Of
murder.
The physical therapy program has
had some of it's best results, the doc
tors reported. in cases with suicidal
tendencies. Such a man wants to
die because he has no longer any in
terest in living Any competitive sport
gives him such an interest temporarily,
and it can be tied up with other things
until it becomes permanent
Proper Selection.
For any of these cases, it was
stressed, the game must be properly
selected so that the patient can do
we'll at it in order that sense of
personal importance will be aroused.
A new treatment for arthritis in
which heavy doses of vitamin D are
combined with heating the tissues with
electric currents and. in some cases,
with sulfanilamlde was reported in an
exhibit by DR.. S. K Livingston of the
Veterans Administration Hospital at
Hines, ILL., The combination seems to
work better, he said, than any of the
three used alone. Vitamin D is the
substance the lack of which produces
rickets in children because of failure
OF the bones to calcify, and which is
produced by the action of sunlight on
many kinds of food. Its relation to
arthritis, which appears experimental
ly, is difficult to understand because in
this disease there is supposedly too
much Qualification around the Joints.
In cases OF arthritis not due to any
specific organism the dosage of the
Wtamin was combined with raising the
BODY temperature between 102 and 1903
degrees Fahrenheit for eight hours
once a week. This would be followed
by long rest and the treatment was
continued from one week to two
months In 80 per cent of 40 cases
there was definite Improvement The
Others Shnued M rocpopee