Acknowledgments

This book is intended to represent, in a small way, an acknowledgment of the achievements of people with brain injury and their families. Some of those who sought assistance from Dr Ted Freeman after the Australian healthcare system effectively discarded them are described in the book. They are intended to be a representative selection of the people who sought his help over two decades. Some achieved remarkable results; others were much less spectacular. Some failed to improve; others died suddenly and unexpectedly, often after making good progress. An unknown number of young victims of motor vehicle accidents lacked a family able to intervene on their behalf and may spend up to five decades in aged-care institutions.

Traumatic brain injury dominated the life of Ted Freeman for several decades. This book would not exist had he not documented his experiences with patients, their families and his professional colleagues. He generously provided access to everything that he had saved and written.

During the period of compilation of the manuscript, I have received notable help and encouragement from people at The Australian National University. Professor Marian Sawer and her committee have provided many suggestions that, when incorporated in the text, have greatly improved it. A member of the committee, Dr Gwen Gray, made an extraordinary contribution to the book, going through it sentence by sentence and suggesting modifications and posing questions to be answered in the revised text. I am very heavily in her debt. When it came to presenting the manuscript in a form suitable for review, my fairly primitive word-processing skills received unstinting help from Alison Plumb. I am most appreciative of her assistance in aiming for a presentable manuscript.

Peter McCullagh