“CHINA DOLL GIRL”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 January 1939, Page 8

“CHINA DOLL GIRL”

LIMBS ARE BRITTLE. A VERY RARE DISEASE. Eight-year-old Effie May Poole, the “China Doll Girl,” whose limbs are as brittle as those of her dolls, is back in bed again tyith another of her fragile bones broken.

Ever since her birth at Herndon, Virginia, she has suffered from osteogenesis, an extremely rare disease which has taken all the calcium (the hardening ingredient) out of her bones.

Scores of times she has had to go •to bed with broken legs or arms after a slip,' a fall or other minor mishap which any other girl of her age would have forgotten within five minutes. Last January she had’to go to hospital with a leg fractured just above the ankle. She had tripped over a rug in her nursery. And she added a touch of irony by spending her time in bed knitting a small woollen rug, says International News Service. She was allowed out of bed recently. Now she is back.

And even after the leg has mended Effie will not be able to tread on it for fear she might slip and break another bone.

The doctor in charge of her has stated that her disease is so rare that little space is devoted to it in any medical book.

“I’ve never seen a case before,” he said. “I should say that not more than one child in half a million has this disease.”

Effie herself said: “Being in hospital isn’t so bad because I get chocolate icecream. But I do wish I could run and play like other children without getting hurt.”