biography
| name: |
Rusk, Howard A(rchibald)
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1903–89)
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| biography:
| Physician and writer, born in Brookfield, Missouri, USA. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in only two years, he joined the medical faculty at Washington University (1929–42) and commenced what would be his lifelong career, rehabilitating disabled patients. In World War 2 he enlisted in the US Army and continued his rehabilitation work at the Jefferson Barracks hospital in Missouri. He focused on the patient's needs after ‘the stitches are out and the fever is down’. For soldiers severely disabled by war this meant taking ‘them back into the best lives they can live with what they have left’ through occupational, physical, and other therapies. In 1946 at New York University he started the first comprehensive rehabilitation programme in the world, and in 1948 it became the Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine (now the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine). During the Korean and Vietnam Wars, he helped South Koreans, from whom he got his nickname Dr Live-Again, and the South Vietnamese. A columnist for the New York Times (1948–69), he also wrote his autobiography A World to Care For (1972). |
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