THE KNIFE IS NOT ENOUGH

Dr. Kessler along with Dr. Howard Rusk and others to whom generous acknowledgment is made, recognized early in his career as an orthopedic surgeon that rehabilitation must be conceived of in terms of total life readjustment. Born in 1876, he had a dream as a young man that he would die at 53; he has spent certainly twenty more years beyond that not only at his own clinic which he founded after World War II but in traveling, lecturing and teaching abroad (from the Balkans, Greece, etc. to Russia and the Orient). Unlike Rusk who has given some of the specifies of adapting to disability in some of his (much earlier) books, Dr. Kessler gives a far more generalized account of his work in public service and medicine with few dramatic or drastic procedures--except the episode in a Quonset hut during World War II when he realized he had to create a cripple, by sawing off a young man's arms and hands. On the whole, this is far less clinical than career-dedicated, worthy if rather difficult to place.