Medicine: A Child's World

In a sunny room at Smiths Hospital, Henley-on-Thames, England, children sat at small tables last week putting colored pegs into holes. Except that the children were psychotics—mostly the scarred offspring of disturbed parents—the room had all the friendly calm of any normal kindergarten. What made it doubly so was the children's custodians, placid-looking young women in their early 20s, who spoke little but seemed unusually affectionate. They sat with their arms around the children, frequently hugged and kissed them. It was no chore to the women; they were all mental defectives, who think on a level close to that of their...

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