DYSGRAPHIA

    These samples are from a Minamata Disease patient's notebook. His hands tremble when he tries to write. In an advanced stage of the disease, a patient's disability gets worse and what he writes becomes quite beyond recognition compared with what he wrote in an earlier stage. This particular patient used to be a fish broker. In 1959 his doctor told him that it was possible that he had got Minamata Disease, so he went into hospital. The members of the fishing co-operative he belonged to, however, compelled him to get out of hospital, insisting that "if we have a Minamata Disease patient in our village, our fish will not sell".