Resettlement--the Last Phase.

In his last budget, the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced as part of his plans the rehabilitation of derelict sites. That reminded me that the term 'rehabilitation' which we have come to use in medicine, is probably. quite inappropriate, becaume it really hints at derelict or down-and-out human beings. It is not really a description appropriate to the resettlement of the sick or injured man who has of course never been ' dehabilitated '; still less is it applicable to the efforts to bring a child physically handicapped from birth through his years of education and re-education to the final stage of being settled in some vocation within his physical limits. As one responsible with others for the introduction of this term immediately following the first world war, I have been most dissatisfied with it for some years. In the search for alternatives, the term ' re-ablement ' is one which appeals to me and which I think was used first by Sir Theodore Fox in one of his Lancet editorials. ' Re-ablement', of course, is the obverse of 'disablement'; perhaps it has a limited application to the physically handicapped. 'Reconditioning' is another possibility, but it is a little cold-we recondition furniture, we recondition clothing. Probably 're-ablement' would be the best of these alternative terms, but it is quite unlikely now that 'rehabilitation' will go out of fashion for a long time, because it has become firmly attached to hospital departments and to institutions.