Stoke mandeville ludwig guttmann biography

German-British neurologist (1899–1980)

Sir Ludwig GuttmannCBE FRS^[1] (3 July 1899 – 18 March 1980) was a German-British^[2]neurologist who established the Stoke Mandeville Games, the sporting event for people with disabilities (PWD) that evolved in England into the Paralympic Games.

A Jewish doctor who fled Nazi Germany just before the start of the Second World War, Guttmann was a founding father of organized physical activities for people with disabilities.^[3][4][5][6]

Early life

Ludwig Guttmann was born on 3 July 1899 to a German Jewish family, in the town of Tost, Upper Silesia, in the former German Empire (now Toszek in southern Poland), the son of Dorothy (née Weissenberg) and Bernard Guttmann, a distiller.^[7][8][9] When Guttmann was three years old, the family moved to the Silesian city of Königshütte (today Chorzów, Poland).

In 1917, while volunteering at a