Paralympics-founder-Sir-Ludwig-Guttmanns-legacy-celebrated-in-BBC-drama

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/9450182/Paralympics-founder-Sir-Ludwig-Guttmanns-legacy-celebrated-in-BBC-drama.html The Paralympic Games were the creation of one remarkable man, whose story is told in a forthcoming BBC drama. Give it some stick: Rob Brydon as Sgt Wynn Bowen with Eddie Marsan as Dr Guttmann in 'The Best of Men' ByCherrill Hicks 4:51PM BST 03 Aug 2012 It was on November 9 1938, the Kristallnacht in Germany, when Jewish property was destroyed wholesale and some 30,000 Jews arrested, beaten, murdered or dragged off to concentration camps, that Ludwig Guttmann, medical director of the Jewish Hospital in Breslau, instructed his staff to admit without question anyone arriving that night. "The next day the Gestapo came to see my father, wanting to know why so many admissions had happened overnight," Guttmann's daughter, Eva Loeffler, recalls. Guttmann took them round all the new "patients";, inventing diagnoses. "My father was adamant that all the men were sick. He took the Gestapo from bed to bed, justifying each man's medical condition." In his unfinished memoirs, Guttmann recalls that 60 of the 64 admissions from the previous night were saved from the concentration camps. Fully expecting to be hauled off himself, he had donned boots and a coat before setting off to the hospital the next morning. The incident was one of several in which Guttmann risked his life for his compatriots, as the noose tightened around Germany's Jewish population. It illustrates the qualities of this formidable neurosurgeon, according to those who knew him: compassion, a strong sense of justice, and immense courage. They were qualities that would help transform the lives of thousands in the years to come - first in Britain where he, his wife Else and two children arrived as virtually penniless refugees the following year, and eventually, around the world. Guttmann is best known as the visionary founder of theParalympic Games. It is thanks largely to him that, from a small archery competition in 1948 involving 16 paralysed British war veterans, evolved a major international sporting event featuring elite athletes with all kinds of disabilities. Yet the achievements of this clever, humane man were not just in the field of sport. Asked to run a spinal injuries unit at Stoke Mandeville Hospital by a British government anticipating the worst as the second front began in 1944, he single-handedly revolutionised the care of paralysed servicemen. Until his arrival they were left to rot (sometimes literally, from bedsores). Mortality was high, with 80 per cent dying within a year of their injury. Those who did survive were doomed to spend the rest of their days hidden away in long-term institutions for "incurables". Guttmann was to change all that. In an era when men suffering horrible injuries were delivered to hospital in coffin-shaped boxes, treated as terminal cases and hidden from sight, he gave his patients hope for the future. His achievements are the subject of a new drama to be broadcast later this month on BBC Two.The Best of Menhas an impressive cast including Eddie Marsan (fromWar Horse) in the role of the stocky, bespectacled Guttmann and Rob Brydon (Gavin and Stacey,The Trip) as one of his patients. Lucy Gannon (Soldier Soldier) wrote the script. "When I was asked to do a film about this bloke who started the Paralympics, my heart sank," she says. "I'm not into athletics. But I fell in love with the character and was caught up in the story." The film, she insists, is not Chariots of Fire for paraplegics. It is less about sporting achievement, more about "a man who never underestimated the human spirit" and its ability to overcome devastating loss.Guttmann himself understood something about loss. Born in 1899 into an orthodox Jewish family in upper Silesia (now part of Poland), he became a pioneering neurologist, only to be dismissed as a "non-Aryan" from his post at Breslau in 1933. In 1938, in line with new racial laws, his licence to practise medicine was withdrawn and he was allowed to treat Jews only. (Yet his reputation was such that the following year he was asked by the Nazis to fly to Lisbon to examine a friend of the Portuguese dictator, Salazar, thought to be suffering from a spinal tumour.) In exile in Britain, Guttmann spent several years doing research at Oxford's Radcliffe Infirmary, before being asked to head the new spinal injuries unit at Stoke Mandeville, one of several being set up by the government. "D-Day was the real prompt," says Harriet Davison, the film's producer. Spinal injuries were then a backwater in medicine. "The attitude was, no one else would do it, so let this eccentric German." Guttmann's first encounter with spinal cord injury had been as a teenage hospital orderly in Silesia when he came across a miner paralysed in an accident. The young Guttmann could hardly believe what he saw: a strapping 6ft man, encased in plaster and kept behind screens, where he developed urinary tract infections and sepsis. Five weeks later he was dead. According to his memoirs (quoted in Susan Goodman's biography Spirit of Stoke Mandeville, now out of print), the case remained "indelibly fixed" in his memory. He was to see many such "hopeless"; cases at Stoke: heavily sedated men, kept on their backs for months, often immobilised in plaster to help "stabilise" fractures, they developed open sores the size of dinner plates; permanently catheterised, they developed bladder and kidney infections. Many died within months. "No one wanted these patients, who smelt of urine and whose flesh was rotting," says Dr Allison Graham, the unit's current director. "They were left in bed for months at a time. Their pressure sores were ignored on the grounds that spinal patients had no sensation. The attitude was, what's the problem?" Gannon's drama, which concentrates on Guttmann's first years at Stoke, reveals how he overturned this fatalism through a combination of charm, obsessiveness and sheer bloody-mindedness. There were fierce battles with nurses, other doctors (Dr Cowan, played by Richard McCabe, calls the men "moribund incurables") and patients themselves. Bringing together new ideas on rehabilitation from the US and Europe, Guttmann got patients out of their plaster, and off their sedation or "gloop" (which caused complaints), and made them sit up (which made them vomit at first) . Most important, he insisted that they were "turned" two hourly at night to prevent pressure sores. Gradually, an 80 per cent mortality rate was turned into an 80 per cent survival rate. A quartermaster was seconded from the army to start exercises to strengthen the men's upper bodies. In her book, Goodman describes how new skills were introduced to make them employable, including woodwork, watch repair and typing. Guttmann's aim was to send the men out into the world "with ambition and purpose" and with the same responsibilities - such as paying taxes - as anyone else. Gradually "Poppa", as he used to be called, won his staff over: nurses who had previously drawn lots to avoid the unit - "they were embarrassed to be with these dying boys", says Davison - would later fight to work there. Two of the patients in the film are inspired by Guttman's medical notes. Sergeant Wynn Bowen (Brydon) hides his misery behind a laconic, caustic wit: the regular turning at night is, he says, "a bloody pantomime", while he describes Guttmann as "Hitler's secret weapon". Bowen is married but would rather divorce than face potential sexual failure. Telling him "there are many ways to skin a cat", Guttmann forces him to go home one weekend; he returns triumphant . Getting wheelchair patients to play competitive sport was one of Guttmann's most inspired ideas. He saw sport as a way to regain fitness, boost self-esteem and above all, restore personal dignity. As the film tells it, the idea came to him after seeing a group of patients frantically propelling their wheelchairs while trying to hit a wooden puck with upended walking sticks in an attempt at polo. Organised sport, be it archery, table tennis or basketball, was to become a mandatory part of the unit's rehab programme. In 1948, on the day the postwar Olympics opened in London, Guttmann organised the first Stoke Mandeville games for the paralysed. In 1960, Guttmann's vision of a true Paralympic Games was realised: 400 wheelchair athletes from 23 countries paraded through Rome's Olympic Stadium, competing in the same sports as able-bodied athletes. In the 2012 Paralympics, more than 4,000 athletes from 147 countries will participate. Guttmann was knighted in 1966, the year of his retirement from Stoke, by then internationally recognised in the management of spinal injuries. He stayed involved with the Games and travelled the world lecturing on spinal cord injury. He died, aged 80, from heart failure in 1980; Stoke Mandeville's stadium, opened by the Queen in 1969, was named in his honour the same year. "The sports legacy is what he is best known for," says Dr Graham. "But none of those achievements would have been possible without the transformation in care of spinal cord injuries he introduced." In one scene in the film Cowan, the consultant, is fuming at the idea of "wheelchairs racing across the lawn". "The national games," he sneers. "National implies the best - the best national cricket team, the best national rugby team. what are these people the best of?" "They are the best of men," is Guttmann's quiet reply. .The Best of Men, BBC 2, August 16, 2012 To subscribe, please writeSUBSCRIBEin the subject line To unsubscribe, please writeUNSUBSCRIBEin the subject line Janet Lehr If I am not for myself, WHO WILL BE? IsraelLives If I am only for myself, WHAT AM I? janetlehr@IsraelLives.orgIf not now, WHEN ? Rabbi Hillel