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This autobiography calls to mind Helen Keller's heroic struggle and victory over her handicaps. Miss Hoopes's story is in the same sense a vital document, demonstrating the possibilities of education and mental therapy for the severely physically handicapped. The first portion of it has an additional psychological value in being a frank confessional of the emotional struggles which resulted from or were considerably intensified by extreme motor frustration.
Dr. Phelps diagnosed the case as an athetosis from an intra-cranial extra-pyramidal injury which resulted in 'no mental impairment or abnormality of disposition' but in extreme neuromuscular disability affecting the limbs, head, pharynx, larynx, etc. and associated with choreiform movements of varying degrees of intensity. Thus only at five years of age was she able to sit up and hold up her head; she learned to walk with great difficulty and ceased walking altogether after a hip injury, which was due, as she later thought, to 'an escape mechanism'. She then learned to get about quickly and efficiently on a specially built tricycle. The particular distribution of her involuntary movements permitted her to accomplish these wider motions as well as those of her sign language where fingers and hands were used only to a slight degree.
This book, executed by one finger on the typewriter, is by its content and style the best testimonial to her victory over the inarticulateness imposed upon her by physical limitations. A wealth of material of psychological interest is contained in that part of the story which deals with her life up to the age of thirty-eight. Though she had not yet received any