Who initiated the training of guide dogs for the blind?

The first GUIDE does for the blind.

The first GUIDE does for the blind were trained in 1916 by Austrian War Dog institute. The original instigator of the project was Dr. Gorlitz, director of the Frauendor Sanatorium near Stettin. One of the doctor’s patients was a young German Officer, partially paralysed, whom he used to accompany for remedial walks in the grounds. On one occasion Dr. Gorlitz was called away in the middle of their walk and the patient tried to continue on his own. His unsteady progress was watched by the Director’s Alsatian dog, Excelsior, who then disappeared in the direction of the sanatorium building and returned with the officer’s walking stick. When Dr. Gorlitz came back he saw the dog gently leading his patient over the lawn to the house. The idea that dogs of such superior intelligence and adaptability could be systematically trained to perform similar service for the blind led first to the experiments inaugurated in 1916, and at the end of the war to the setting up of a permanent training centre at Postdam under Government auspices.

The Guide Dog movement in Britain was begun at Wallasey, Cheshire in July 1913 by Miss M.E. Crooke, a local dogbreeder, and Mr. Musgrave Frankland, himself blind and Secretary of the National Institute for the Blind in Liverpool. Initially the dogs were trained by G.W. Debetaz, who had been lent by L’Oeil qui Voit, the American-run Guide Dog organization in Switzerland. The recipient of Guide Dog No. 1, Meta, was G.W. Lamb, a war-blinded ex-soldier from St Dunstan’ s.a