Seventy Years of Studenthood
Studying physiotherapy was as beautiful as it was difficult. Every physiotherapist was at some point a student; a period of …
Greed, Jealousy and the Demise of Medical Physiotherapy
Before its adoption by laymen (or more correctly, laywomen) the word ‘physiotherapy’ was used by the medical profession to describe all of the physical agents, including the X-ray. In the 1920s, radiology became a unique medical specialty, but for a brief period in the nineteen tens and twenties it was …
Asthma and Your Child
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 …
Physical Therapy in Pakistan:
50-Years to Recognition
In Pakistan the physical therapy profession underwent a gradual development, taking around 50 years to reach its current level of education and recognition. The initial steps occurred in 1956 at Jinnah Postgraduate Medical College, through a partnership between the Ministry of Health (MOH) and the World Health Organization (WHO), to …
History of Physiotherapy in Croatia
The Balkan region, where Yugoslavia partly extended (Socialist Federal Republic from 1942 to 1992), comprised the republics at that time, which are now independent states: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo. In this territory, the Association of Physiotherapists and Occupational Therapists of Yugoslavia was established on …
Historical Electrotherapy Equipment on Display
Avid historians at McGill University, Canada have curated a display of intriguing physiotherapy equipment dating back to the Gaiffe Nerve Stimulator, c1860. Sarah Marshall PT Fellow, Faculty Lecturer, School of Physical & Occupational Therapy, and Rick Fraser, MDCM, Professor, Department of Pathology, Director of the Maude Abbott Medical Museum, and …
Lest We Forget
At the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month – we will remember them. The Armistice (Latin = “to stand arms still”) agreement to end the hostilities of the First World War at the beginning of peace negotiations, began at 11am on the 11th of November 1918. …
The History of Light Therapy
Historically, light treatment has roots in ancient Egypt, India, and Greece, as “heliotherapy” (natural sunlight) for the treatment of skin diseases. Modern phototherapy (artificial light) has its origins in the latter part of the 19th century, with the observation in 1877 that sunlight was beneficial in the treatment of anthrax …
A Micro History of Physiotherapy in Italy
If we accept the etymology of physiotherapy as phìsis (natural) therapy, one of the oldest practice might seen in be the use of vapour grottoes in the territory of Sciacca (South of Italy) since the 5th century A.D. In Roman times, massage was a remedial practice carried out by fricatores …
America’s first Physical Therapist
Whilst Mary McMillan is lauded as the mother of the American Physical Therapy Association, the nation’s first ‘practitioner’ was more likely Charles Fayette Taylor, who brought the therapeutic exercises and massage of the Swedish Movement Cure to New York half a century earlier. Judge for your self by reading excerpts …
Interview with a Russian physiotherapist, soldier, spy and double agent
My name is Olga Capatina. I was born in Moldova, in the North, on the banks of the Dniestr in 1955. My parents were also Moldavian. In fact, they were Romanians before WWII, but after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact Moldova became part of the USSR. I studied at the Balti Pedagogical …