A Nightmare Began the Dream... 

It all started with my first impression of child abuse in its worst form. One evening in 1958, while I was working at St. Mary's Hospital as night supervisor, a three-year-old girl was brought in who was the most severely injured victim of abuse I had ever seen. The child had been sadistically tortured since birth. Her nose was crooked from a previous, untreated fracture, her face and body were a mass of healed burns and scars, both her arms were crooked from breaks which had not been set, and she was skin and bones. She was starving. I had seen some cases of what is termed "nonaccidental injury" before, but never anything like this. This was my first experience with the horrible plight of children who are utterly helpless at the hands of their own parents.

This little girl and her brother had each been brought in earlier, but a diagnosis of nonaccidental injury had never officially been made or recorded. The children had separately been brought in three or four times to the emergency room or to pediatrics with serious injuries. Nurses suspected these were nonaccidental injuries, but no definite actions could be taken to assist the children. The brother and sister, adopted at birth, had been tortured from the time they were born!

About six months after this little girl was released, her brother was brought in, drowned. Supposedly, he slipped in the bathtub. When the little girl was admitted to the hospital again, she was in a pitiful state, but mercifully the case had at last come to public light.

A teenage babysitter hired to care for the parents' other children had heard crying sounds coming from the basement. Thinking it was a stranded kitten, she went down and found the child tied to the hot water-heater with rope and wires. Horrified, the babysitter said nothing until she went home and told her mother, who called the police. Tucson police officers went out, investigated the home and brought the child to St. Mary's emergency room. Over the few years of her life this little girl had been the victim of multiple fractures, hot water burns, cigarette burns and sadistic injury many times. The attending pediatricians in the hospital had never seen a child so badly abused. She was at this time hospitalized for many long months.

Subsequently, the body of her brother was exhumed for autopsy, and the evidence indicated that his injuries were nonaccidental. The girl underwent intensive plastic surgery repeatedly, and was in twenty-two foster homes over the next eighteen years. To our dismay the parents never were prosecuted and eventually moved out of Arizona.

There is a happy ending to this horror story. I recently met the girl, now a young woman, and found that she is married and has a baby of her own. She seems to be doing a really fine job as a parent. Her love for her baby is so great that I am sure she will do all the things for him that she missed as a child. Still, I know she worries about the effects of her childhood on her relationship with the baby. Even at the age of twenty-two she is still undergoing plastic surgery to correct the scars and deformities left by the injuries she suffered as a child.

What made this case an even more terrible nightmare was that the child's father happened to be a practicing physician at the hospital. The nurses were not in a position to speak up against a physician who was practicing in the hospital, and fellow physicians were unwilling to accept responsibility for making the father face the real problem: child abuse.