The book Asthma and Your Child was first published in 1963 by New Zealand respiratory physiotherapist Bernice “Bunny” Thompson. It focused on the need for well-targeted breathing and physical exercises in the management of children’s asthma.
The book’s popularity continued through to subsequent editions, despite the introduction of metered dose inhalers that later revolutionized the treatment of asthma (Donoghue and Nicholls, 2012).
A review of the third edition of the book in the Physical Therapy journal highlighted the unique style of messaging in the book, praising the manner by which Thompson,
..uses games, stories and rhythms to capture and sustain the interest of children of all ages. The children “learn by doing”. (Extrom and Crawford, 1971)
The book was so successful that a film based on it was made by the New Zealand National Film Unit in 1967. The film is 27 minutes long and available here.
The film follows Kaye, a young girl, with asthma who learns to use diaphragmatic breathing and a little boy called Phillip who learns to self-clear mucous from his airways, both using games and imagery. They join a group of other children who participate in a range of game-based exercises to improve their breathing. The film concludes with Kaye blowing out the candles on her birthday cake, for the first time in her life.
The film Asthma and Your Child was commissioned by the Canterbury Medical Research Foundation and was an early example of a privately-funded socially-useful film. Director Frank Chilton won renown for his documentaries dealing with the health and welfare needs of children.
Bunny Thompson
Born Bernice Joyce Alldred, Bunny grew up in Dunedin and began her physiotherapy training in 1941 (Donoghue and Nicholls, 2012). She married Dr Heath Thompson – a graduate of the Otago Medical School – in 1943, and together they had a fascination with respiratory disease. Heath would later pioneer vascular and cardiac surgery, but in 1944 they began their careers together at Grey River Hospital in Greymouth.
The Thompson’s moved to China when civil war broke out and volunteered for the Quaker’s Friends’ Ambulance Unit. After three years they moved to Wuhan, where Heath became general surgeon and Bunny set up a school of physiotherapy. In 1949 the Thompson’s moved to England and worked in London and South Wales, specialising in the management of chronic respiratory diseases. They returned to New Zealand in 1952 and settled in Christchurch.
In New Zealand, tuberculosis was a major problem, and both were involved in work at the Cashmere Sanatorium, but Bunny’s work began to focus more on asthma, and in 1963 she published the book Asthma and Your Child. In 1967 Bunny published a second book titled Better Breathing. This time written for adults, the book proved equally successful and ran to four editions.
In 1968, Bunny and her husband published a paper entitled Forced expiration exercises in asthma and their effect on FEV1 which demonstrated how the exercises assisted in the mobilization and clearance of secretions in patients with asthma. It would be another eleven years before Bunny and Jennifer Pryor would write the follow-up work on the Forced Expiratory Technique that would begin the gradual shift away from postural drainage and percussion in physiotherapy practice.
Bunny was awarded a Fellowship of the New Zealand Society of Physiotherapist in 1977 for “distinction in the advancement of physiotherapy” and the following year received the Queen’s Service Medal for her services to the community. Her final film Asthma. Why Physiotherapy? was shown throughout the world after its launch at the 8th World Congress of Physiotherapy in Israel in 1978. Bunny died in 2009 in Christchurch, a pioneer in the field of respiratory physiotherapy.
References:
Donoghue V and Nicolls, D. (2012). Bunny Thompson – respiratory pioneer. Accessed online at https://www.historyofphysio.co.nz/document-library/making-history-articles/bunny-thompson-respiratory-pioneer/
Extrom FM and Crawford SH. (1971). Book Reviews: Asthma and your child, 3rd ed. Physical Therapy, 51(3), 361.
