“She was nearly blind and barely able to walk because of bad arthritis,” Curt says. “I wanted to learn how to help her.” Curt went to medical school in Germany, aiming to become a general practitioner, but became fortuitously sidetracked by neurology and during a rotation in Zurich, he developed a fascination with spinal cord injury and recovery.
In Zurich, Curt set out to understand spinal cord physiology, and how that physiology changes in response to different types of injuries. He has since specialized in paraplegia at Balgrist University Hospital. Both a scientist and clinician, Curt is the lead of the European Multi-Center Study for SCI, a dedicated research effort to uncover innovative treatments for people with spinal cord injury.
A Historical Journey
Throughout his career, Curt has taken a keen interest in the history of SCI, in particular, its roots in World War II. To prepare for D-Day in 1942, the Medical Research Council in London, together with the allied forces, began thinking about how to care for the soldiers who were paralyzed from gunshot wounds — and they built the first SCI unit in England.
“At the time, spinal cord injury was a death sentence,” Curt says. “Soldiers either died acutely or due to chronic complications months down the line; it was just a question of time.” But over the past several decades, the field learned that people can recover from SCI. “We now know that these young people can get back to work. They can get back to their families,” Curt says.
Still, when Curt started his career in SCI, he was skeptical. “I figured I would only last a year because we were limited in what we could achieve,” Curt says. But today, he is part of a dedicated community of physicians and scientists who are helping people with SCI recover function and mobility.
“Once we understand the elements of recovery and disentangle which elements represent neural recovery and which represent increases in the individual patient’s skillfulness, adaptation and compensation as part of rehabilitation, we can better predict the degree of recovery a patient can expect,” Curt says.