This is the inspiring story of a woman who waged a valiant battle for the restoration of the crippled, diseased and mentally disturbed to useful lives through occupational therapy. Long before occupational therapy had attained official recognition or the medical profession as a whole had admitted its vital role in recovery, Ora Ruggles was recruited as a reconstruction aide and arrived at the Army Rehabilitation Center at Fort McPherson, Georgia, in September 1918. There, against stiff opposition from many of the medical staff, she worked an almost miraculous change in war-wrecked men, some of them given up by the doctors as hopeless.  There, too, she fell deeply in love with a young soldier and herself faced grief and futility when he died. But her indomitable will not only to survive but to triumph over obstacles led her into a dedicated career in occupational therapy, first at military hospitals, later at private sanatoriums and finally at Children's Hospital in Los Angeles where on a voluntary and unpaid basis she started an occupational therapy department and taught other volunteers so that they, in turn, could spread occupational therapy to other hospitals. Her work contributed greatly to the establishment of occupational therapy as a profession and to its now widespread use in hospitals all over the country. The Healing Heart is an absorbing, warm and heroic story that dramatizes an outlook on life that is all too rare.

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