Epileptic's Education

When he was four years old, Eugene Z. of Wapakoneta, Ohio tumbled down the cellar stairs, banged his head, was knocked out for a few minutes. Two years later, he suddenly fell into an epileptic fit, had to leave school. After that, every day for 17 years, fits seized him as often as 18 times a day. While his nine brothers and sisters grew up, he clung to his mother, a man-size baby. Last October, in despair, his parents took him to Neurologist Howard Douglas John Fabing of Cincinnati.

Young Dr. Fabing found it impossible to talk to Eugene "because of the numerous small attacks which followed quickly one upon the other." The boy sat vacantly in his office winding spools of twine, fumbling with balls of tinfoil like a kindergarten child. His mental age, Dr. Fabing found, was just where it was when he left school: six years. Dr. Fabing tried giving Eugene daily doses of seven-and-a-half-grain tablets of dilantin sodium, a new treatment for epilepsy developed two years ago by Drs. Hiram Houston Merritt of Harvard and Tracy Putnam, head of Manhattan's Neurological Institute. Within three days, Eugene's fits stopped.

Next question for Dr. Fabing: Could a 23-year-old brain, which had not been used for 17 years, respond to education? He sent Eugene last January to live with Psychologist Doris Twitchell Allen, hired as tutor Mrs. Richard B. Freeman.

Last week, to the Cincinnati meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Fabing took Eugene, a smiling, self-possessed young man. Proudly Dr. Fabing told of Eugene's amazing six-month progress from baby to man, a case unparalleled in psychiatric history, hailed by conservative Dr. Putnam as "epoch-making."

Dosed with dilantin every day, Eugene galloped through his first readers in three weeks, taught himself multiplication without help, learned to play ball, badminton and card games, dressed up for formal dinner parties, played gently with year-old babies. Within six months, said Dr. Fabing, Eugene's mental age had leaped from six to ten. His progress still continues.

Eugene's case, said Dr. Fabing, exploded the old theory that epilepsy destroys the brain. For as his body grew, Eugene's brain also expanded and unfolded. As long as epilepsy kept it under, it could not develop as a thinking machine.

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