A Doctor's Journal
Family Discontent
By MILES
HOWARD THE child with catarrh : what a problem he is !—to the par- ents, to the doctor, to his teacher and schoolmates, indeed, to everyone. A family doctor has lately written a most valuable paper on this universal malady in the Journal of the 'Family Doctor's College.' He outlines the 'natural history' of the catarrhal child—looseness of the bowel at birth, snuffles at four months, fits with high fever from the first year, colds from two and a half, then earache. Mum and Dad are up all night, weary and worried, very likely feeling helpless. By the age of four, colds are pretty frequent. In the first school year, more colds; headache and earache cause repeated absence from school. Attacks of pain in the belly, sickness and vomiting will often follow some emotional upset. At seven the child's health begins to pick up and by ten the doctor seldom sees him.
Dr. Nichols believes that illness in the child is, in a sense, a 'symptom' of anxiety in the mother. Most of the catarrhal children he has seen fall into the category of 'over-protection and over-indul- gence,' and one main causal factor is the urge of the mother to make up for what she missed in her own childhood; another is conflict in a mother who tries to do her best, but has a rejecting attitude to the child, that betrays itself in undue devotion. The child whose parents press the doctor for more and better treatment is (in the author's view) being utilised, albeit unconsciously, by a mother who is in emotional need herself. The pattern of illness, in the child with catarrh, can be related to the development of his indepen- dence: at six, say, he begins to turn away from Mother, and by nine he is reaching for freedom. Therapy, then, should be directed, not so much at the catarrh and its consequences, but at the mother and her inner disharmony.
This concept of illness-in-a-child as a pointer to family discontent—especially in Mum, but also in Dad, or Gran, or whoever is the 'storm centre' —can of course be extended beyond catarrh: in fact, its limits are the limit of medicine itself. It is an axiom that the unit-of-illness is not the individual, but the family group—and the sick child is a particularly striking illustration of this truth.
The essay mentioned above brings out another principle—that the kinds of sickness generated by disharmony in the home are not merely 'bad nerves,' panic attacks and the like, but bodily disease as well. Catarrh is one, crops of boils another—the list is pretty long and every family doctor could add to it.
* • It seems that the human eye is an even more remarkable instrument than we had supposed it to be. Some recent experiments have shown that the mechanism of perception of colour is not a simple and static 'registration' of shades and mix- tures of colours, but a dynamic process of activity : the retina and the visual cortex (the area of grey matter that handles visual images) continuously compare, contrast and balance the incoming light 'signals' and their wavelength : the colours in our picture of the world around us are determined not by fixed 'blends' of stimuli in the signals, but by the relative balance of long and short wavelengths over the entire scene. One quite simple test can demonstrate this. The 'classical' theory has been that red, green and blue are the primary colours, and all the rest were, in effect, mixtures of these. According to this theory, a combination of red and white can result in pink, and nothing but pink. Now, if we take two projectors and place in each a black-and-white transparency of the same scene, identical except that one is rather lighter and the other rather darker, the image on the screen is black and white; if a red filter is held in front of one of the projectors, the image springs into full and vivid colour. When the filter is taken away it reverts to black and white again. The only re- quirement is that one of the transparencies should be taken by long-wavelength rays and the other by short.
Is the classical theory, then, in all its long history from Newton onwards, entirely incorrect? The answer appears to be that the men who worked on this theory dealt with spots of light, and pairs of spots, perhaps trying to match one to another; the conclusions they reached were then assumed to apply to all colour vision. But the perception of colour, under natural conditions, does not follow these rules at all. The new theory gives the eye- brain mechanism a much more active and versatile role. The retina is not just a biological camera that passively records : the whole visual apparatus works unceasingly on the stimuli it receives, and the image we see is the final product of this work. There is a comparison here with the function of memory : it, too, is much more than a 'flat' record- ing—what we recall is the resultant of a play of forces, of which the decisive one may be emo- tional, that picks out and 'spotlights' one event and suppresses another.
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