Tag: C20th
Are We Keeping Physical Therapy White?
Medicine has often been framed as the “ideal” profession, leading other health fields to emulate it when pursuing their own professionalisation. American medicine’s current education system came about during the early-twentieth century, as part of a multi-decade campaign to enhance the profession’s status by restricting education to an elite few, …
100 Years of Enraf-Nonius
Enraf-Nonius is a Dutch medical equipment manufacturer celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. For many physiotherapists Enraf-Nonius have provided the equipment used across entire careers, and so they have grown in parallel with the profession. Founded in 1925 by Mr AG Hoekstra, the First Dutch X-ray Machine Factory [Eerste Nederlandse Röntgenapparaten …
Careers for Girls
In 1927 ‘The News’ newspaper in Adelaide, South Australia ran a weekly series of articles on their Woman’s page exploring suitable careers for girls; “a problem which at times confronts the parents of daughters”. The newspaper obtained the information for the article from an un-named “authority in the occupation”. The …
The Value of Physical Treatment
The following Letter to the Editor, published in The Lancet in 1918 provides an extraordinary review of the growth of physiotherapy from the First World War. SIR,—The Prime Minister in his speech on Nov. 16th, in placing the case for the Coalition at the Central Hall, Westminster, said: ” The …
Paralympic History
On the eve of the Paralympics Games Paris 2024 where more than 4,000 athletes, representing 169 nations, will compete over twelve days for 549 medals across 22 events it is instructing to consider its humble beginnings. At a hospital for war veterans in Stoke Mandeville, located 60 kilometres north of …
A Personal History of Dry Needling
In 1992 when I was studying a post-graduate manual therapy course at Curtin University, Perth, the educational emphasis was primarily on joints and neural tissue, with an early smattering of pain science. Whilst assessing a patient during one clinical session, no tests related to any of the education provided were …
A Short History of Physiotherapy in Ireland
Miss Amelia Hogg set up the first Irish School of Massage at 86 Lower Lesson Street, Dublin in 1905. Nine years later the school moved to 12 Hume Street and remained there for 50 years. Miss Hogg had trained as a nurse, and the 1911 census recorded that she was …
America’s Slouching Epidemic
In her recently published book “Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America” Beth Linker argues that at the onset of the twentieth century the United States became gripped by a poor-posture epidemic: a widespread social contagion of slumping that could have deleterious effects upon individual health, and the body politic. Posture …
A Distinctive Style
In September 1940, in the dark days of the Second World War, Denmark was occupied by Germany and Rudie Agersnap was elected chairman of the Danish Massage Association. Restrictions and rationing brought challenges for the profession, with a lack of necessary goods for the masseuses to carry out their work. …
How Australian Chiropractors Transformed World Physiotherapy
Osteopathy was devised in 1870s America by Dr Andrew Taylor Still (1828-1917) and chiropractic some twenty years later by David Daniel Palmer (1845-1913). Both utilised a structural perspective to explain and treat functional disturbances. Over the years, orthodox medicine viewed such practices with disdain. The wide variance in training, lack …