Medicine: Stuttering Fingers

Writer's cramp is an ailment that has puzzled doctors for more than a century, and it continues to baffle them. The victim of writer's cramp is seized by a strange kind of palsy. He may be able to play the piano or balance a teacup, but as soon as he tries to write, his fingers begin to stutter. Some doctors think that the cramp is an occupational disease brought on by too much writing. They prescribe 1) a long rest from writing, or 2) a change of occupation.

All these prescriptions are wrong, a British expert now reports. M. Narasimha Pai, an Indian-born psychiatrist attached to Britain's Mill Hill and Sutton Emergency Hospitals, has decided that previous investigators were misled by the name of the disease, which is also known as "scrivener's palsy." Writer's cramp, he says, has nothing to do with writers or writing fatigue; it is a symptom of neurosis and may attack anybody.

In the British Journal of Mental Science, Pai reports that he has found writer's cramp surprisingly widespread in Britain.* He examined 1,880 psychoneurotic British soldiers and found that 171 had writer's cramp. Only six, all clerks, had done a good deal of writing. Most of the patients developed their symptoms upon being assigned to uncongenial jobs that required some writing.

The patients were really ill, thinks Pai, and were not just trying a fancy dodge. Cramped writers, he observed, fall into two distinct classes: 1) the tremulous type, whose writing is wavering, generally suffered from severe anxiety, 2) spastic (pinched) or ataxic (jerky) writers were suffering from hysterical neuroses.

Following through on his clues, Pai was able to relax writing cramps in short order. His treatment was drastic psychotherapy—sedatives and insulin for anxious patients, hypnotic suggestion for the hysterical.