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The Paralympics, the quadrennial competition for athletes with disabilities that follows the Olympics, will draw some 4,200 participants to London in late August to vie for medals before 1.5 million ticket holders, 5,600 journalists, countless television viewers - and, for the first time, a bronze bust of the bespectacled physician and refugee from Nazi Germany who started it all.
Sir Ludwig Guttmann, whose groundbreaking treatments for traumatic paraplegia provided the platform for what has become the Paralympics, is getting some long-delayed official recognition at last.
The bust of Guttmann that will be on display at the London Paralympics was presented to the International Paralympic Committee's president, Sir Philip Craven, last June by supporters of Guttmann. It will be lent out for display at all future Paralympic Games, as well, to visibly memorialize the father of what has become an enormous worldwide movement.
"We wanted to create a lasting legacy of Professor Guttmann's contribution to the initiation of Paralympic sport," said Mike Mackenzie, chairman of the Poppa Guttmann Trust, which commissioned the bust. The trust, established in 2010 to promote awareness of the history of spinal cord treatment, also commissioned a full-sized statue of Guttmann that will stand outside the National Spine Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, in Aylesbury, where Guttmann worked.
Born in 1899 to a Jewish family in Tost, Germany, Guttmann grew up in the coal-mining town of Königshütte. It was there, as a 17-year-old hospital volunteer, that he saw his first paraplegic patient, a coal miner who wasted away and died after a fracture of the spine. As a medical student in Freiburg, Guttmann was an active member of his Jewish fraternity, where he worked against anti-Semitism in German universities. At the same time, the young doctor...