Cerebral Diplegia Following Birth Injury *This paper formed the substance of a short address illustrated by lantern slides given before the Bristol Medico-Chirurgical Society on 12th May, 1948.

*HE subject of cerebral palsy is attracting renewed interest in this country owing to the formation of a British Council for the Welfare of Spastics and the setting up at Croydon and elsewhere of special treatment centres for spastic and athetoid children. Mainly as a consequence of the work of Phelps in America it is becoming more generally realized that well-devised training methods may biing about substantial improvement in those diplegics who retain a fail degree of intelligence. There is also reason to believe that the number of such handicapped children in the community is fai from negligible, since in Bristol Dr. Small wood has discovered seventy cases of cerebral palsy in a school population of fifty thousand. It would seem, then, that the social implications of cerebial palsy aie sufficiently important to justify further research : for while it may be said that advances have been made in treatment, at any late foi the fortunate few, there still remains much to be disco\ered as regards the causation and perhaps the prevention of this common form of paralysis in childhood. In particular, the part placed by birth-injury in the pathogenesis of the condition needs to be more fully investigated. Since the time of W. J. Little's classical paper to the Obstetrical Society of London in 18G1 an association between cerebral palsy