Spartans

Many a tearful child has been told of the Spartan boy who hid a fox under his shirt, never even winced when the fox bit him and kept on biting him, finally fell dead, still with a dead pan. Last week readers of the Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin wondered whether that Spartan boy was just a freak, after all--a child who could not feel pain. For the Bulletin told of two little Baltimore boys and a girl who were like the Spartan. Johns Hopkins' Drs. Frank Rodolph Ford & Lawson Wilkins discovered them, found that they stubbed toes, barked shins, broke bones, chewed fingers raw, lifted hot plates off stoves -- all without complaint. Even when the tender Achilles tendon (just above the heel) "is squeezed these children make no protest and show no sign of pain," reported the doctors. When touched with a pin they can feel the difference between the point and the head. And they can distinguish slight changes in temperature. The doctors concluded that the children "do not have analgesia or loss of any type of sensibility. They are merely indifferent to pain."

This indifference may account, say they for the vaudeville entertainer who let spikes be driven through his hand, for the "eminent jurist" who bit off the tip of his crushed finger, for the woman who squeezed herself headfirst into a blazing furnace. What is the explanation for such indifference to pain, Drs. Ford & Wilkins could not say, decided that it may be akin to such mysteries as congenital color blindness, word deafness and word blindness.

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