Return from the Womb

Jerome Meyer was 37, and greying at the temples, but he was curled up like a fetus, with his knees locked against his chest, his arms curled around his knees. He had to be spoon-fed and diapered by his mother, who wheeled him around in a barrow that served as an oversize perambulator. Unlike the normal baby of which he was a gross and ghastly caricature, Meyer could not even crawl. He was like that for 22 years--until late last year, when he was wheeled into Minneapolis' Kenny Rehabilitation Institute./- Jerome Meyer's story might have been invented as an illustrative example for a textbook of Freudian psychology. Only child of a dirt-poor couple in backwoods northern Wisconsin, Jerome was none too bright, but otherwise little different from neighboring children until he was 15. Then his parents sent him to live on an uncle's farm so that he would be closer to school. Almost at once, Jerome began coughing so much he was taken to a hospital. But he was soon released. Then he drew his knees up and nobody could straighten him out. Mary Meyer quickly reclaimed her crippled darling and devoted her life to caring for him. Jerome's father, Vincent, a sometime carpenter, did his part by making a wooden cart in which the boy could be wheeled around. "This Big Lug." For two decades, the three Meyers acted out their self-imposed roles. Then Vincent Meyer died. Mary Meyer moved to Rice Lake, lived on welfare and her husband's World War I veteran's pension, and told the neighbors that Jerome had had polio. One day, aging and herself infirm, she trundled Jerome into the Rice Lake office of Dr. James F. Maser. She thought her son was anemic. "He sure wasn't anemic," says Dr. Maser, "and we didn't think much of the polio story. And with this big lug lying around on that cart, everybody felt sorry for his poor little hunchbacked mother.'' It took welfare officials a long time to persuade Mrs. Meyer that Jerome should go to the Kenny Institute. With warm baths and painful stretching exercises, the physical therapists managed to loosen Meyer's limbs a little. But not until after a psychiatrist had hypnotized Meyer did his knees unlock; even then they stayed in a 90DEG bend. By this time, the doctors were sure that Meyer's original troubles had been emotional. The spasms that had bundled him into helplessness 22 years before were his unconscious solution to the shock of being removed from his mother's protectiveness. They were the closest he could come to a "return to the womb," and guaranteed him against ever again being expelled. Faith in What? After Jerome Meyer learned to scoot up and down the institute's corridors in his wheelchair, it was time for corrective surgery. But Mrs. Meyer protested: "We don't believe in surgery. We believe in faith healing." The statement did not ring true. Mary Meyer was a Roman Catholic, and to Kenny psychologists she was really saying that she wanted to keep Jerome as a helpless baby. She had told them: "I like him just the way he is." With the help of priests, doctors of her own faith persuaded Mary Meyer to approve the operations that Jerome needed. Fortnight ago, Orthopedic Surgeon Wesley Burnham spent three hours at St. Barnabas' Hospital, lengthening tendons at the hips and knees that had been shrunk by long disuse. It is almost certain, Dr. Mary Price says now. that after two or three months of more physical therapy Meyer will walk again. The man who spent more than half his life as a baby may yet be able to take a job in a sheltered workshop. If so, he will cut the umbilical cord and his mother's apron strings at the same time.

/- A rehabilitation center named for the late Nursing Sister Elizabeth Kenny, who devised active treatments to restore polio-crippled limbs.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.