Every physician who deals with any considerable number of children with paralysis of cerebral origin is impressed by the fact that the motor disturbances vary enormously in type. Most common, perhaps, is the conventional spastic type, either hemiplegic or paraplegic, with scissors gait, contractures and increased reflexes. Others show bizarre abnormalities of motion, speech defect and changes of muscle tone, without great variations in reflexes. Mental defectiveness of any degree may accompany the motor manifestations.
Pathologically, a wide variety of lesions have been described, and the searcher in the literature is left with a confused idea that so many causes may produce cerebral palsy, that it is useless to try to localize lesions accurately.
As a result children with cerebral palsies have, to a large extent, been grouped as essentially hopeless, except as tenotomies or nerve section might relieve disabling spasticity or contracture. Classification has been distinctly unsatisfactory, and a