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During a recent tour of duty as surgeon in chief of the American Hospital in Britain (February to August 1942) I became interested in the problem of rehabilitation as faced by the Armed Forces of Great Britain. In the Churchill Hospital at Oxford my associates and I were de facto a reconstruction unit placed at the disposal of all branches of the services. A great many of the military patients were there as a result of accidents in the course of training and of accidents in transport. Others came from far off Libya, while there were even a few left over from Dunkirk. Thus there was a mixture of recent to moderately recent injuries, including both simple and compound fractures, together with older problems of nonunion and malunion, often associated with osteomyelitis, and always in these older problems there was the element of impaired function with its threat of permanent