Freddie Stands Up

Just three weeks short of his second birthday, Freddie Thomason stood up last week for the first time in his life. No less remarkable, he wore a little pair of overalls, and sat down--also for the first time in his life.

Freddie Thomason was born without arms or legs. The blue-eyed, towheaded son of the Herschel Thomasons of Magnolia, Ark., Freddie has smooth, sloping shoulders with no. sign that arms had ever begun to form. Unlike most "congenital amputees," he was born with virtually no stumps where legs should have been.

In 30 years of rehabilitating cripples and amputees (including cases from Guadalcanal and New Georgia), New Jersey's famed Orthopedic Surgeon Henry Howard Kessler had never seen such a case when

Mrs. Thomason first took Freddie to him last year. The only "quadruple congenital amputee" Dr. Kessler recalled in medical literature had had more conspicuous stumps than Freddie. Medical science has no explanation for such biological accidents.

Hopeless as it seemed, Freddie's case was studied carefully at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in West Orange. Dr. Kessler showed Mrs. Thomason how to exercise Freddie to develop his trunk muscles, rolling him from side to side and making him twist as much as possible. Back home in Magnolia, where her husband is a radio repairman, Mrs. Thomason exercised Freddie for 45 minutes, twice a day, for almost a year.

Last week bright-eyed Freddie was at the institute again. Dr. Kessler had decided that his trunk muscles had developed enough for him to be fitted with his first pair of legs. Made of plastic, the legs are only thigh-length (usual for learners), and held to Freddie's body by a corset-like harness. The toes of the stumps point backward for better balance. A simple screw adjustment made by the nurse or mother makes the legs flex so that Freddie can sit down.

Freddie is to visit the institute daily for about a month, learning to balance his weight first on one leg, then on the other--vastly more difficult for a child who has no arms to steady himself. Only after that can he learn to walk. In six months Freddie will return to Dr. Kessler for adjustments. Then the doctor will try to decide how to start on the still more forbidding problem of fitting Freddie with arms.

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