Dr Ludwig Guttmann: The Paralympics’ Godfather
After the Olympics comes the Paralympics, the pinnacle of the disabled sporting calendar. For Team GB, Tokyo 2020 could not have gone much better. Finishing with a combined total of 124 medals, Team GB ended up in second place on the medal table.
The Quadrennial event is now almost as big as the Olympic Games, but the fight for fair recognition of its quality has been hard won. While the Modern Olympic Games began in 1896, the Paralympic Games did not exist until 1960 – and even then the competition was just a shell of the offering we’re treated to today. The 1960 Rome Paralympic Games saw 400 athletes from 27 countries competing in 57 medal events across 8 sports (archery, Para athletics, dartchery, snooker, Para swimming, table tennis, wheelchair fencing and wheelchair basketball). In comparison, the Tokyo Paralympics boasted 4,537 athletes from 134 nations and a refugee team, competing in 539 medal events across 22 sports. The Games have expanded exponentially in their 61 years of existence, but without the extraordinary efforts of Sir Ludwig Guttmann, there may not have been a Paralympic Games at all.
Ludwig Guttmann was born on 3 July 1899 in Tost, Germany (nowadays it’s called Toszek, Poland). The eldest of four children, Guttmann was born to Jewish parents. In 1918 Guttmann began studying medicine at the University of Breslau. After also studying in Wurzburg, the German received his Doctorate in Medicine from the University of Freiburg in 1924. It was time to return to Breslau, working with Europe’s leading neurologist Professor Otfrid Foerster. Under Foerster’s tutelage from 1924 to 1928, Guttmann built himself a reputation as one to watch in the field of medicine. After a year away in Hamburg working in a neurosurgical unit, Guttmann was back working with Foerster, this time as his first assistant. Guttmann remained in this position until 1933, when the Nazi Party came to power in Germany.
The most famous of the Nuremberg Laws (the laws which severely restricted the rights of German Jews) were enacted in 1935, however the origins of these anti-Semitic laws can be traced back to almost the moment Hitler stole power. As with most dictators, the crackpot ideas needed to be eased in while they tried to cement their grip on power. The waters needed to be tested before they rolled out their racist agenda in full. As a result, the anti-Semitism needed to be drip fed into German society. One of the early measures taken by the Nazis to discriminate against Germany’s Jewish community was to ban Jews from practising medicine in ‘Aryan’ hospitals. Unable to continue working with Foerster, Guttmann became a neurologist at Breslau’s Jewish Hospital. He rose through the ranks quickly and in 1937 he was elected the hospital’s Medical Director.
Guttmann’s life, as with every other German Jew, had been greatly disrupted by the Nazi regime by the time he became the Medical Director at Breslau. But the worst night was yet to come. Kristallnacht, also known as the Night of Broken Glass, was one of the darkest days in German history. It signalled the end of any remaining efforts to disguise the Nazi Party’s state sponsored anti-Semitism. On 9 November and 10 November, Nazi’s and Nazi sympathisers took to the streets to burn synagogues and damage homes, schools and businesses owned by the German Jewish population. Almost 100 people lost their lives at the hands of the anti-Semites, with many more being injured to varying degrees. Over the two days, 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and dispatched to concentration camps. Under Nazi law, Jewish doctors were only allowed to look after Jewish patients. However, given the chaos and destruction that occurred during Kristallnacht, on 9 November Guttmann decided the hospital would treat any man who walked into the hospital. In all Guttmann’s staff helped 64 men. The next day, Guttmann had to justify the large number of patients to the SS and the Gestapo. The German doctor’s daughter, Eva Loeffler, described how Guttmann managed to get away with it:
‘He took the Gestapo from bed to bed, justifying each man’s medical condition. He pulled faces and grimaced at the patients from behind their back, signalling to them to pull the same expressions and then saying, ‘Look at this man; he’s having a fit!’
The situation in Germany was evidently deteriorating fast. Fortunately, Guttmann would only have to wait a month for his chance to get out. By December 1938 all German Jews had had their passports confiscated. For Guttman however, an opportunity to escape the clutches of Nazi oppression for a few days presented itself when the Reichminister for Foreign Affairs, Joachim von Ribbentrop (whose previous position had been the German Ambassador to the United Kingdom), ordered Ludwig Guttmann to visit Portugal immediately, in order to treat a friend of the Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar. Following the treatment, Guttmann was given two days to visit London. Whilst there, he met with representatives of the British Society for the Protection of Science and Learning. A grant was offered and with it, a ticket out of Germany. On 14 March 1938, two days after Nazi Germany annexed Austria (an event known as Anschluss), Guttmann, his wife and his two children moved to Oxford. They were now safely in England, but if anyone thought Guttmann was going to fade quietly into the background of medicinal history, they would be mistaken.
Upon arrival to Oxford, Guttmann begun working at Radcliffe Infirmary and St Hugh’s College Military Hospital for Head Injuries. Then, in 1943, the Government offered Guttmann the chance to become the director of the brand new National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville. Little did Guttmann know at the time, but his acceptance of this personal career defining appointment would also pave the way for decades of career defining moments for disabled athletes.
The Spinal Centre at Stoke Mandeville Hospital was opened in February 1944 with one patient on its books and the capacity to look after another 23 people. In the early days the centre was poorly resourced, but within six months Guttmann’s centre was treating close to 50 patients. Key to Guttmann’s approach to people suffering with spinal injuries was the importance he placed on rehabilitation. It seems an obvious stage in the recovery of paraplegics now, but before the National Spinal Injuries Centre was opened, the life expectancy for paraplegics from the time of injury was just two years. Even if you were to set aside his contributions to disabled sport, the influence he had on the care and recovery of those who have suffered spinal trauma is monumental. He was a true revolutionary in the fields of spinal injuries and physiotherapy.
To raise the life expectancy of his patients, Guttmann believed it was important to give those suffering the opportunity to return as close as possible to life pre-injury. To that end, Guttmann encouraged his patients to take part in activities that would have a positive impact both socially and physically. These activities included woodwork, clock and watch repairing and, of course, sport. The first sport Guttmann’s clinic at Stoke Mandeville Hospital played host to was wheelchair polo. Wheelchair basketball made its debut soon after. Another popular sport at Stoke Mandeville was archery, partly as it allowed the paraplegic participants to compete on an equal footing with non-disabled participants, and it was archery that Guttmann chose as the sport for the hospital’s first competition.
On 29 July, the opening ceremony of the 1948 London Olympics was held. Occuring three years after the conclusion of the Second World War, the Olympic Games gave the world an opportunity to come together again. It was also a chance for Britain to show how well its post-war recovery was progressing. Regardless of how well the British spirit and its cities were rebuilding though, thousands of Brits found their lives permanently changed as a result of the war. While the world was marvelling at the spectacle put on by a city pretending all was well again, Guttmann was hosting a competitive archery competition made up of servicemen and women who could not so easily shake off the consequences of war. 14 ex-servicemen and 2 ex-servicewomen competed in a day of wheelchair archery competition in the inaugural Stoke Mandeville Games. The Games were a hit with those competing and so became an annual tournament, with a new sport being added to the competition every year with the exception of 1956. On the same date in 1949 the second iteration of the Games was held, with net-ball (an amalgamation of netball and basketball) added to the Games. In the 1952 Stoke Mandeville Games, Guttmann welcomed four Dutch athletes. Whilst Poles, an Aussie and a Frenchman had competed in previous Games, the four paraplegic athletes competing for the Netherlands were the first to compete officially representing their nation. Guttmann’s hope to make the Stoke Mandeville Games a global event had taken a large step forward.
The Stoke Mandeville Games gained international recognition in a number of ways. Guttmann’s former patients were all too keen to spread the word of their doctor’s approach to rehabilitation. The medical journal ‘The Cord’ also played an important role. Publication of ‘The Cord’ began in 1947. In it were articles and advice for paraplegics. ‘The Cord’ often featured reports on the sporting events at Stoke Mandeville. Given that publications of its nature were few and far between, ‘The Cord’ gained international exposure and consequently so did the games. Most significant of all though, was Dr Guttmann’s own promotion of the Games. Travelling around the world giving talks, delivering lectures, and visiting conferences, Guttmann never turned down an opportunity to discuss his competition. For example, in 1956 he visited Royal Perth Hospital, Australia. Whilst there he met Dr George Bedbrook. Two years previously Bedbrook had founded the Department of Paraplegia at the hospital. Guttmann wasted no time in encouraging Bedbrook to bring an Australian side to compete at Stoke Mandeville the following year. In the 1957 Stoke Mandeville Games, 360 athletes from 24 nations (including Australia) competed over two days in 9 sports. The final Stoke Mandeville games took place between 23-25 July 1959. 360 athletes from 20 nations took part in 11 sports.
The following year the very first Paralympic Games were held in Rome. Guttmann’s vision to bring the Stoke Mandeville Games in line with the Olympics had been realised. While it would take time for the entire world to be brought on side, for the thousands of athletes who competed in the Stoke Mandeville Games and the tens of thousands of athletes who have competed or continue to compete in the Paralympics, there could be no divergence from the thought that the work of Dr Ludwig Guttmann changed their lives immeasurably for the better.
Sources:
https://www.paralympic.org/ipc/history
https://www.paralympicheritage.org.uk/professor-sir-ludwig-guttmann
https://www.history.com/topics/holocaust/kristallnacht
Cover Image:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Ludwig_Guttmann2.jpg
Credit: Unknown authorUnknown author, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
