ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Fighting Spinal Cord Injuries: Ludwig Guttmann (1899-1980) and Sport Therapy

• In Event: Possessed, “Crippled”, Uncombustible: Bodies at the Limit of Technologies and Genders

English Abstract

Biographies of German Jewish neurologist Ludwig Guttmann (1899-1980) have stressed his heroic character from War refugee and great luminary of science. In fact, Guttmann went through an impressive scientific career with national and international resonances throughout the Twentieth Century. His new therapeutics of sport as a treatment for spinal cord injuries and other neurological disabilities led to the foundation of the Paralympic Games for the disabled and the progressive establishment of an international network of medical centres that successfully developed Guttmann’s innovations in the Cold War years. Taking a critical distance from this standard account, this paper brings to the fore still-unknown aspects of Guttmann’s spinal cord injury treatments at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Aylesbury (England). It stresses how, from a gendered perspective, sport therapeutics resulted from a collective endeavour, in which skilful women, physiotherapists, host and refugee doctors, disabled patients – concerned about their masculinity-, and an international network of medical centres actively co-constructed Guttmann’s new paraplegia treatments. The article also aims to enrich a new historiography of disability that assigns new roles to experts and lay actors in the shaping of new knowledge about the body and its limits.

Author

• Agustí Nieto-Galan, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona