The value of sport for the severely physically handicapped

Sir Ludwig Guttmann touches only lightly upon the enormous change that has since come about in this field. True, he experienced this change and yet did not really participate in it — because it was he who brought it into being. His optimism prevented him from accepting (as we did) the gloomy outlook for paraplegics and tetraplegics; his thorough training in neuropsychiatry and neurosurgery helped him to understand the need of men afflicted by devastating catastrophe to be regarded in their entirety, and provided him with the means for prompt, unrelenting and appropriate medical action. And all this in the uncertainty of his own existence, jeopardized as it had been by catastrophe, but which he took in his hands with as much resoluteness as optimism—for himself and for the salvation of the countless individuals who, so often in the flower of their youth, after the slaughter on the battlefields of yesterday are now paralysed for life by the slaughter on the