Ludwig Guttmann

Sir Ludwig Guttmann (1899 to 1980) was a German-British neurologist and neurosurgeon who founded the sporting movement that grew into the Paralympic Games. Born to a Jewish family in Tost in Upper Silesia, he qualified in medicine at Freiburg in 1924 and worked under the neurosurgeon Otfrid Foerster in Breslau until Nazi laws removed him from his university post. As medical director of the Breslau Jewish Hospital he admitted patients without question after Kristallnacht, and the source records that 60 of 64 admitted patients were saved from arrest. He left Germany for Oxford in March 1939. In 1943 the British government asked him to found the National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, which opened in 1944 as the first specialist spinal injury unit in the United Kingdom. He treated sport as a form of rehabilitation and organised the first Stoke Mandeville Games for wheelchair veterans on 29 July 1948, an event that developed into the Paralympics.