Medicine: Left Foot Foremost

In 24 years of bitter poverty Mrs. Patrick Brown, a Dublin bricklayer's wife, bore 22 children, but only 13 lived. Halfway down the line came Christy. He could not hold his head up and his mouth, was lopsided. His hands jerked violently with no coordination; his right leg was equally useless. Doctors told Mrs. Brown that Christy was an imbecile (actually he had cerebral palsy from a brain injury before or during birth) and that his case was hopeless. With the medical knowledge of the early 1930s, the doctors were not far wrong.

But...

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