He entered rehabilitation as a specialist: ‘as in religion’. He not only became a great specialist in his own field, but also helped many other sufferers in the field of spinal cord traumatology and also divers medical victims with affections of the spinal cord.

He had an accident, in July 1945, while spending summer holidays, accompanied by his wife Paule, who was also a second-year medical student, mother of a baby girl. After diving in shallow water he became an incomplete tetraplegic, by fracture of the cervical spine. To be hospitalized in a big university hospital in Paris, in those days, was certainly not the same as nowadays! His wife overheard, at the famous Salpétrière Hospital, the Professor saying: ‘Let's go and see that young medical student, who does not stop dying’. He has reported his Memoirs of his Life, as a Pioneer in the field of Neurological Rehabilitation in his book ‘Le Plongeon vers la Vie’ published in 2002. Most of the time he was wheelchair bound.

He became the Chief Consultant of the Rehabilitation Unit of the Hospital of Fontainebleau, near Paris. His rehabilitation techniques soon made his renown throughout all Europe and he was appreciated all over the American continent. But, he never reeducated himself until he was admitted, at the age of 53, in the Rehabilitation Centre of Necker in Paris. He suffered of all sorts of autonomic dysreflexia and became an international expert of the autonomic system, besides all the others complications as sores, urine infection, spasticity and so on. He studied his own complications very closely and wrote several leading articles in the medical press. I met him at Stoke-Mandeville accompanied by Jean Bénassy and Professor André Grossiord, who worked at the Rehabilitation Hospital of Garches, near Paris. They usually arrived at SM for the ‘Games’. I called them: Les Trois Mousquetaires: The three Musketeers. We became rapidly the best of friends.

His attitude and understanding of patients, and families, their problems as suffering human beings, became more than legendary. He created the GENULF (Groupe d’Etudes de Neuro-urologie de langue Francaise) and also the AFIGAP (Association Francophone Internationale des Groupes d’ Animation de la Paraplégie), which had both a tremendous impact in the French Speaking countries. His collaboration with the APF (Association des Paralysés de France), of which he became Vice-President, was most fruitful. He was honored by the French Government first as Chevalier in the ‘Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur’ and very quickly after ‘Officier’ in the Légion.

He was a member of IMSOP, later ISCOS, since the start in 1960, and rapidly became its Vice-President. Sir Ludwig Guttmann admired him very much.

He published as Editor in 1981, with many collaborators, a wonderful book on: ‘La paraplégie chez l’adulte et chez l ‘enfant’. To me and Barbara, he and Paule became very good friends.

We pay honor to a great man and offer our condolences to his wife and family.