EDITORIAL

For Your Education and Information ELIEVING that doctors have a heavy responsibility towards B ensuring that the care of ‘spastics’ is as good as possible, the

National Spastics Society has initiated two major schemes of immediak interest to all doctors, It has set up a Chair in Paediatric Research with research laboratories, and it has more recently made a new departure in medical philanthropy by initiating the ‘N.S.S. Unit for Medical Education and Informa- tion.’ This journal, Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology (which incorporates the Cerebral Palsy Bulletin), is one major channel whereby the unit will strive to achieve its aims. The scope of the journal will be wide; for to improve prevention, early diagnosis, assessment and habilitation of cerebral palsy all doctors concerned will need to hear of advances in many fields. Original articles, abstracts and titles of recent relevant papers will be included as well as the reviews of progress in various fields which we have found to be greatly appreciated. Paediatricians, public health service doctors, neurologists and many other doctors in all continents have expressed very kindly opinions of the contents of the Cerebral Palsy Bulletin. Develop- mental Medicine and Child Neurology will try to be more useful still.

In this Number This number does well to start with the article on ‘Behaviour

after cerebral lesions in children and adults,’ by TEUBER and RUIIEL, for it is an important ‘break-through.’ It will make neurologists less mystified by some of the observations of paediatricians and vice versa, and should help both towards understanding the patients they see. It was originally presented in a. symposium organised by Dr. G. PAMPIGLIONE and we are grateful to him as well as to the authors for its appearance in 1 his journal. This article, RICHMOND PAINE’S contribution, and the brief report of OLIVER ZANGWILL’S talk at the A.C.P.P. illustrate the need for neurology to be aware of studies of perception which have sometimes been neglected as being psychological rather than neurological.

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In one of his last papers, Sir GEOFFREY JEFFERSON referred to the two most important discoveries of the last 25 years in neurological studies. The reticular formation was one and the visceral function of the lower frontal cortex and island of Reil was the other. BRADLEY reviews physiological and pharmacological aspects of the part played by the ‘Diffuse systems of the brain’ in wakefulness. Some will like to re-read CALMA’S ‘The reticular formation re-visited’ which appeared in the first volume of the Cerebral Palsy Bulletin (1959, No. 6,

Ross MITCHELL’S recent review of the Moro reflex will make his present review of the ‘Landau reflex’ very welcome to those who study normal infants. They will also welcome MARY SHERIDAN’S article on the care of children in day-training centres, while some children with cerebral palsy may receive immediate benefit as a result of GRACE WOODS’ ‘Preliminary clinical trial of Carisoprodol.’

pp. 1-9.)

RONALD MAC KEITH

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