Paralympics of 1953

The playing fields of Stoke Mandeville, Aylesbury, England, were cleared last week for a competition called the Paralympics, and a crowd of 3,000 watched teams from eight nations fight out the two-day meet. The sports on the calendar were commonplace: netball (similar to U.S. basketball), snooker, archery, table tennis, javelin throwing, shot-putting and swimming. The manner of competition, though, was singular. Each of the 200 contestants was a paraplegic, denied the use of his lower body and forced to remain in a wheelchair for life. Some players were so badly crippled that the table-tennis paddles had to be strapped to their hands.

Coach and founder of the Paralympics is the director of the Ministry of Pensions

Hospital at Stoke Mandeville, Dr. Ludwig Guttmann, a German neurosurgeon who came to Britain in 1939. During the war Surgeon Guttmann became interested in the plight of paraplegics, invalids whose cases were sometimes written off as hopeless by the medical profession. In 1944, Guttmann went to Stoke Mandeville, with one patient, to see if some form of physical activity could help him.

Guttmann's solution was to strengthen his patient's back and abdominal muscles, so that he could use them to move his pelvis. He compares the process to the case of a man walking on stilts, who uses the upper part of the body instead of the leg and lower trunk muscles to get around. With the newly developed muscles, the paraplegic can hold himself erect and move his upper trunk, arms and shoulders. Guttmann found that the best way to keep the muscles strong was to launch a sports program. He invented the Stoke Mandeville swimming stroke: the patient sits upright in the water, paralyzed feet floating in front of him, and rows himself backward with his arms.

Surgeon Guttmann is probably the first man to use athletics as paraplegic therapy, and he is one of the most successful. Since 1944, he has trained 1,000 paraplegics at his hospital; although they will never leave their wheelchairs, 600 of them now live at home, work in offices or even on factory assembly lines.

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