surmount your handicap and achieve a happy, satisfying
life while you are handicapped-in spite of your handicap-
or, better still, because of your handicap.
Beethoven wrote his immortal symphonies
when he was deaf.
Milton wrote Paradise Lost when he was blind.
Alexander Pope was so crippled that he hardly
could move, yet he became one of the giants of English
literature.
Julius Caesar was epileptic, yet he conquered
the then-known world. When he felt an epileptic seizure
coming on, he gave instructions for carrying on the battle
while he was unconscious. When he regained conscious-
ness, he calmly resumed command as though nothing had
happened.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, crippled by infantile
paralysis, became President.
In a prison cell, John Bunyan wrote Pilgrim~s
Progress, a book that is one of the epics of English
literature.
Robert Louis Stephenson was never, even for
one hour, free from pain and a hacking cough. He suffered
from fever and tuberculosis. Yet he wrote Treasure Island
and many exciting or humorous stories.
We could fill the rest of this book and many
additional volumes just giving examples of the crippled,
the sickly, the physically handicapped, who disdained
sympathy and by sheer determination achieved the greater
solace of surmounting their infirmities.