Google homage with a doodle
Ludwig Guttmann,
neurosurgeon and neurologist, born on 3 July 122 years ago.
He founded the largest spinal injury hospital in Europe (Stoke Mandeville, Buckinghamshire, UK) and, in 1948, devised the first Games for the Disabled as a rehabilitation method which was the inspiration for the first
official Paralympic Games
, which took place in Rome. in 1960.
A German Jew who escaped the horrors of Nazism, Guttmann went down in history for revolutionizing the treatment of patients suffering from spinal trauma. Left to themselves, seen little more than walking corpses to accompany the extreme unction, Guttmann's hopeless patients on the contrary received something to fight for, a light at the end of the tunnel. When London hosted the first post-war Olympic Games in 1948, Guttmann organized parallel archery and javelin competitions at the hospital; he understood that competition is first of all in the head of the human being. After the Second World War he treated veterans who had suffered spinal injuries
