Medicine: Action for Amputees

Even Colonel Robert S. Allen, the onetime Washington columnist who lost an arm in Germany—and the most outspoken critic of present artificial limbs—was mollified last week. Colonel Allen had lunch with six other amputees, Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers, and Major General Paul R. Hawley of the Veterans’ Administration, the man responsible for veterans’ artificial limbs. Some time during the two-hour lunch, General Hawley made Allen chairman of a committee of amputees to pass on new prostheses (artificial devices), and told him to pick his own committee.

There was other hopeful action for crippled veterans:

¶ General Hawley announced that the Veterans’ Administration—for the first time in history—plans to spend $1,000,000 a year for prosthetic research. ¶ Walter Bura, a 31-year-old civilian amputee with a bent for engineering, was appointed chief of the VA Division of Prosthetic Devices with the job of speeding new inventions to the wearable stage. Bura, who walks so well himself that no one realizes his leg is off above the knee, is credited with having “revolutionized” the Army’s methods of teaching amputees to walk.*

¶ A House subcommittee report, just out, gives an eleven-point program for improving artificial devices and smoothing the way for their purchase and repair.

*Research on hands is not so pressing. The Miracle Hand, for instance, is excellent if properly attached to a good, lightweight arm: the fingers move separately and can pick up any thing from a toothpick to a chair.