Grant Aids Med School To Study Car Accidents

A federal grant of $809,820 has been awarded to the Medical School's Department of Legal Medicine for research into the little-explored field of traffic accidents, the University recently announced. The five-year program will be the first "grave-to-cradle" study of accidents fatalities ever attempted.

The unique study's objective will be to determine the basic underlying causes of traffic mishaps, tracing the emotional and physical histories back to infancy and considering every detail of the disasters.

All fatal accidents in metropolitan Boston and Cambridge will come under close scrutiny by a fourteen-member in-vestigating team, which will be headed by Alfred L. Mosely, research psychologist, and Dr. Richard Ford '36, chairman of the Department of Legal Medicine.

So sweeping is the program's scope that the researchers will have their own two-way radio station and police permission to interview any and all recalcitrant witneses. The radio will be used to alert the investigators as soon as any fatalities occur.

Staff on the Scene

A psychologist, a traffic engineer, an automotive engineer, and a mechanic, alerted by radio, will be sent immediately to the scene of fatal crashes. At the same time a physician will be sent to the hospital to interview and examine the driver involved if possible, or to arrange for a special autopsy, which will search for causes for the fatalities which would not be readily apparent.

Interviews Planned

Within the next 24 hours those involved in the crashes or their next of kin will be interviewed by clinical pyschologists. Meanwhile, basic data on the crash will be gathered, and several staff members will study the cases from their respective points of view. Finally, a Roman Catholic priest will evaluate the facts of the crashes from a moral and ethical stand point.

Dr. Ford and Mr. Moseley feel that the study will go a long way towards establishing basic accident causes and making the roads safer for everyone. For every cause determined, they have stated, "there must be a preventive measure to go with it. We might not know what the measure is, but after our research we will know where to go to find it."