The Paralympics' Origin Story Is A Moving Lesson In Caring For The Forgotten

Less than a century ago, a spinal cord injury was considered something of a death sentence. Most people before World War II died within three years of sustaining one. And before death, they were mostly cast aside from society and forgotten, largely considered a lost cause. But something changed in 1944 when a doctor named Ludwig Guttmann opened the Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Great Britain. A Jewish emigrant from Nazi Germany, Guttmann was a neurologist by trade who hoped to improve the general condition of paraplegics, and the Stoke Mandeville Hospital would become his center for helping those who sustained spinal injuries ― at first from the war, particularly from D-Day. Unlike his neurological predecessors, however, Guttmann decided to focus not just on the body, but on the mind. One of the major issues for people with spinal cord injuries, he realized, was depression, understandably developed after being discarded by society and left in beds. And so, he worked tirelessly to infuse something new in them: a sense of optimism.   They had basically been told in their previous hospitals that they would never walk again and that they were going to die ... And then suddenly here were these nurses saying, "You can do this. We’ve got to get you up." “They had basically been told in their previous hospitals that they would never walk again and that they were going to die. As a result most of them were badly depressed and not interest...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news