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CHAPTER 36
FIG. 259.
space within the toilet. In this respect. Professor Nugent of the Illinois University in the
U.S.A. has been pioneering for many years with excellent results.
Spinal paraplegic children should not, as a general rule, be admitted to special
schools for disabled to be mixed with cerebral palsy children with mental defects. There
has been an increased understanding of this principle in recent years, but that was not
always so, and to give an example the following case may be mentioned: a boy with a
complete transverse lesion below Tio was placed, after discharge from the Spinal
Centre, in a special school for disabled, where he was quite unhappy. He was a bright
boy, and when the writer was approached by the boy's father steps were taken to place
the boy in an ordinary school, where the headmaster was most co-operative. In due course,
this boy gained a scholarship in mathematics to Reading University and from there he
won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he passed his Ph.D. in mathe
matics with flying colours. He obtained an appointment as lecturer in mathematics at
Nottingham University and became married, and from there he won a Fellowship to
Princeton University in the U.S.A. At present, he is lecturer at San Francisco University.
This boy, had he not been given the opportunity of a normal education might now have
been perhaps a second class clerk in an office. There is still a good deal to be done by
educating authorities to separate the purely physically handicapped child from the
physically and mentally handicapped.
