How Children Live after Disfiguring Burns

Abstract

At the Boston Shriners Burns Institute, where this study was undertaken, a great number of burned patients present a further complication: poor socioeconomic conditions, which often have a clear causal relationship with the injury. Because of this complex of relationships, not only the psychodynamics of the child and his family, but social conditions and the widely variant nature of the trauma itself, each case, in the end, is singular. Nevertheless, for each severely burned child and his family, it can be said that the psychological effects of injury are both of great magnitude and lifelong. This study, then, is particularly concerned with the individual patient, his family, their attempt to cope with their problem and—beyond that—what can be done to help keep them in the community somehow and out of the pale of despair.