Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 41, Number 80, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 June 1909 — APPLYING MEDICAL GYMNASTICS [ARTICLE]

APPLYING MEDICAL GYMNASTICS

Sdfferers from Locomotor Ataxia Have Special Apparatus. Had Charles Dickens lived in this age of medical wonders he might not have had his Lady Tippins trying to hide the waywardness of her limbs by an assumption of playful skipping, of Cousin Feenix wandering off at tangents when he desired to walk tarough a doorway. Instead, his characters would have gone to a school at medical gymnastics and defied the novelist to find fault with their gait. Such a school is to be found in Phi) adelphia. Were the afflictions of the patients subject for laughter, it might cause amusement to watch them going through their queer exercises on the odd looking machines in the clinical rooms. One of the most interesting of the apparatus is a. stairway on which have been cut grooves for the feet of the individual who in condemned by fate and the physicians to tread the steps of this treadmill. The stairway, intended to bring back to those afflicted with locomotor ataxia the lost coordination of motion, has steps of a uniform height, in each of which are cutouts for the feet of the patient he Wctlks up and down this odd stairway he supports himself by the hand rails. He is compelled to place his fjet in the cutouts as he exercises, and in time, it is said, regains the power of making his feet do as hie mind dictates, instead of the pedai extremities wandering w-ildly off on excursions of their own, after the Lady Tippins or Cousin Feenix style. A device that is still more curious is a tenpin arrangement, consisting of a block of wood, on which are mounted on springs a number of pins similar to those used in bowling alleys. Each pin is lettered or numbered, and the patitnt sits in front of this apparatus, and, upon the order ot the nurse or attendant, kicks a certain pin either with the right or left foot as ordered. The tendency of the er ratic limbs is to attack the G pin when ordered to punish that marked A, or to inflict a jolt on B when it is the turn of the D pin to be kicked. Also, the left leg refuses to obey orders and the right insists on taking up the kicking out of its turn, while the left will try to kick when it is the right’s inning. In time, however, according to the originators of this method of restoring lost co-ordination, the telegraph apparatus from the brain gets into working order again, and the feet have to obey the will of their owner. Locomotor ataxia is a hardening of the spinal cord. One of the most troublesome symptoms, outside of sharp, shooting pains, is the ataxic gait, a staggering walk. In mild cases the patient loses control over motion and staggers while walking; in severe cases he can’t walk at all and has to stay in bed. It is the mild cases that these medical gymnastic machines are designed to cure. Other methods employed for the same pur ■ pose are the teaching of the patient to stand in a correct upright position without swaying or tumbling, the training of the afflicted one to walk a straight line or on certain patterns, and to step over books, blocks or bottles placed on the l floor without knocking any of them down. After the patient has gained a certain amount\of control over the movements the exercises are made more difficult by being done with closed