A New Year and New Ideas

Christmas over we flew back to Sydney on New Year’s Eve. On the Air New Zealand flight I watched the BBC drama celebrating the life and achievements of Dr Ludwig Guttman.  There are many amazing aspects to this man’s life but the drama focuses on his work at Stoke Mandeville hospital in Britain from 1944.  Here he treated soldiers with spinal cord injury.  

At this time, treatment for such patients involved encasing them in plaster and sedating them.  There was limited chance of people with spinal cord injuries surviving due to the medical “care” they received and those that did were usually left to a life with little hope or purpose.

Ludwig Guttman saw things differently. 

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