'From this troubled generation [of anti-Vietnam protesrtors], impatient, mistrustful, uncommitted, most of our patients now come. I must confess that it will sometimes toss us a queer one. Those of us who deal with veterans had become accustomed to patients who showed some slight evidence of the regimenting effect of military service. Far from having abandoned their individual prerogatives, they had at least learned the lesson of working in groups and of recognising that some sort of authority, however judiciously administered, was necessary to hold any enterprise together. The change began to be evident during the early days of the war in Vietnam; it was then that I encountered my first paraplegic beatnik. Lest you think I have fallen behind the times, I assure you of my awareness that beatniks are no longer the thing, as well as my confidence that the hippies who are now the vogue will in turn be replaced by abreed as yet unnamed. But to return to my patient; he was a young man of a little better than average intelligence and his military record was unimpeachable. He was long of hair and had a guitar which he played often until the other patients, in their own way, made known to him their musical preferences. He had a girl friend who was with difficulty convinced that his hospital bed was designed for single occupancy. Above all, he had his own idea of priorities. On admission he had a pressure ulcer which, after weeks of treatment, was almost healed. At this point he went absent without leave, returning unrepentant after a week or more to explain that he had driven to New York, some two hundred miles distant, to make a recording. The condition of the ulcer may be imagined, but he explained, quite reasonably, that making the record at that particular time was important enough to him to be worth a few more weeks of treatment in bed. He didn't deny the soundness of my advice; he simply chose not to take it. He didn't argue about my authority to order him to remain in the hospital, he just disregarded it. Some weeks later the incident was repeated. He was quite pleasant about it and when he was finally discharged we parted friends.' (150)

'We must, I think, bring a new and broader dimension to the concept of rehabilitation. It must be a holistic approach according to the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of holism: 'Tendency in nature to form wholes that aremore than the sum of the parts by creative evolution'. We must stop thinking of vocational rehabilitation or musculo-skeletal rehabilitation - or even of rehabilitation of the urinary tract - and focus upon the total rehabilitation of man or woman in terms of the society in which he or she must live. The parts are all essential but the whole will be greater than their sum if we devote our energies to the processes of creative evolution rather than to the defence of a fixed and no longer relevant pattern.' (151)