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Concept
Ludwig Guttmann
Summary
Sir Ludwig Guttmann (3 July 1899 – 18 March 1980) was a German-British neurologist who established the Stoke Mandeville Games, the sporting event for people with disabilities (PWD) that evolved in England into the Paralympic Games. A Jewish doctor who fled Nazi Germany just before the start of the Second World War, Guttmann was a founding father of organized physical activities for people with disabilities.
Ludwig Guttmann was born on 3 July 1899 to a German Jewish family, in the town of Tost, Upper Silesia, in the former German Empire (now Toszek in southern Poland), the son of Dorothy (née Weissenberg) and Bernard Guttmann, a distiller. When Guttmann was three years old, the family moved to the Silesian city of Königshütte (today Chorzów, Poland).
In 1917, while volunteering at an accident hospital in Königshütte, he encountered his first paraplegic patient, a coal miner with a spinal fracture who later died of sepsis. That same year, Guttmann passed his Abitur at the humanistic grammar school in Königshütte before being called up for military service.
Guttmann started his medical studies in April 1918 at the University of Breslau. He transferred to the University of Freiburg in 1919 and received his Doctorate of Medicine in 1924.
By 1933, Guttmann was working in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland) as a neurosurgeon and lecturing at the university. He learned from the pioneer of neurosurgery, Otfrid Foerster, at his research institute. Despite having worked successfully as first assistant to Foerster, Guttmann was expelled from his university appointment and his job in 1933 under the Nuremberg Laws, and his title was changed to "Krankenbehandler" (one who treats the sick). With the arrival of the Nazis in power, Jews were banned from practising medicine professionally; Guttmann was assigned to work at the Breslau Jewish Hospital, where he became medical director in 1937. Following the violent attacks on Jewish people and properties during Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938, Guttmann ordered his staff to admit any patients without question.
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