Medicine: Dance Therapy

Polka-dot curtains brightened the windows, and red valentines fluttered from the walls. But there was only blankness or despair on the faces of the score of patients who shuffled one day last week into a recreation room at the Federal Government's St. Elizabeths Hospital for the mentally ill in Washington, B.C. Schizophrenics who had been hospitalized for a year or more, they drifted silently in their own private worlds. One man was racked with uncontrollable tremors. Another lifted his head as if to hearken to inner voices.

Then a greying, grandmotherly woman wearing dancing slippers put a Strauss waltz on the phonograph...