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When as a young medical graduate Kit Wynn Parry found out that the Royal Air Force was looking for recruits for the new specialty of physical medicine, he jumped at the chance. As a student during the second world war he had missed out on active service and, like many of his peers, was keen to serve.
The specialty emerged during the war to enable pilots-who were expensive to train and in short supply-to quickly return to active service after injury. Physical medicine, later known as rehabilitation, was new and exciting, "a young man's specialty," as Wynn Parry described it. 1
Wynn Parry had started to specialise in rheumatology at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, where he had worked for Herbert Seddon, professor of orthopaedic surgery. Seddon had done some early work classifying nerve injuries, their treatment, and neuropathic pain.
Wynn Parry developed this interest when he joined the combined services rehabilitation units at Headley Court and Chessington in Surrey in 1948. He became an expert on treatment of hand injuries-largely self taught as there was nothing in the medical literature. He soon remedied this with his first book, Rehabilitation of the Hand , which was published in 1958. 2
Wynn Parry described the rehabilitation service as a "dynamic, progressive, integrated programme," with a workshop where patients could rehabilitate their hands as part of their treatment but also keep their skills up to date. 1 The unit started as an orthopaedic service but, with British forces in military operations all over the world in the 1950s, it expanded...