The Brain-Injured

For the first three years of his life, Billy was just another blue-eyed, blond youngster playing noisiiy and energetically with the neighbors' kids in Phoenix. Then one day he was hit by a car. Except for a bump on the head, he seemed unhurt and soon he was out playing again. But within a few days, he fell on a playmate's porch and lay there in a convulsive seizure. At the hospital, his parents learned that Billy's brain had been injured when he was hit by the car.

Billy's condition kept getting worse, and his parents became more desperate. His frequent seizures threw him to the floor where he cut his lips, blacked his eyes and bruised his body. He became frightened and insecure--the more so as other children shunned him.

"A Saint." Billy's parents went deep into debt, taking him to psychologists, psychiatrists and neurosurgeons (he had one brain operation, to no result). When they could borrow no more, their family doctor called Oreste Eslick Hood, director of Los Angeles' Institute for Child Study. Psychologist Hood said simply: "Bring the child to me." Billy's parents took him to Hood's special training school. There, for nine months, Hood lived and worked with Billy. Today, Billy is attending public school. Says his mother simply: "Mr. Hood is a saint."

Nobody knows precisely how many cases there are like Billy's, but they number hundreds of thousands. Famed Neurosurgeon Tracy Jackson Putnam estimates the number of brain-injured persons in the U.S. at as many as 2,500,000. Of these, he says, 13% have cerebral palsy (in which the injury to the brain involves the motor centers), and for them, much is being done. Perhaps 30% are so mentally retarded (often because of birth injuries) that they can be given little but affectionate care.

The group for whom most can be done, and least is now being done, according to Putnam and Hood, are a majority of the brain-injury victims, i.e., those who have been crippled by such things as blows, encephalitis, or a sustained high fever in infancy. Their plight is often worse, in a way, than that of the mentally retarded, because they know they are different and yet cannot help their failures and seizures.

Most of them are lost in time and space. Many cannot judge distances. Billy, for example, is missing the tip of one finger: he was pointing at the whirling wheel of a bicycle on a kickstand and jammed his finger into the spokes, which had seemed to him at a safe distance. Often they cannot count unless they can touch the objects. Most victims have a tantalizingly short attention span, so that teaching them calls for Job-like patience, but paradoxically they suffer from perseveration --the tendency to keep on saying a word or repeating an action long after the occasion for it has passed.

Drugs & Understanding. Bronx-born, California-trained Psychologist Hood, 40, saw the difference between the truly retarded and the salvageable brain-injured when he was hired to handle a class of Chinese "morons" in San Francisco. Most, he found, were not retarded at all, but their natural intelligence could not function normally because of their injuries. After he met Dr. Putnam (who has done as much as any man living to develop the use of drugs which now control epilepsy in two-thirds of its victims), Hood took over an abandoned mansion on West Adams Boulevard and started his special boarding school.

The 2O-bed school has no gates or bars, no locks on the doors, and Hood leaves his cashbox unlocked. Yet his cases include juvenile delinquents convicted of larceny

Dr. Putnam prescribes drugs to control seizures; Hood adds the ingredients of love, patience and understanding. There are no punishments. Punishing a brain-injured delinquent, says Hood, "is like punishing a blind boy for tripping."

First the youngsters learn that Hood is on their side; soon they strike up friendships among the other students. But when, thanks to specialized and often individualized teaching techniques, they begin to overcome their handicap, they must be taught not to withdraw into their own society. "I keep telling them that this is a hothouse setup," says Hood, "that it isn't quite normal. Every chance I get, I take them with me to the cleaner's, the market or a restaurant. Then, with the security of the school behind them, they begin to cope with the world outside."

The U.S. has only a handful of such schools for brain-injured children. There should be hundreds, says Dr. Putnam. As a next step, he and Hood are laying plans for a $1,000,000 ranch school for more children whose parents do not know where to turn for help.

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