Soviet Electrotherapy
Perhaps no other country in the world has been engaged in the hardware of physiotherapy as massively as the Soviet Union. Since childhood, every Soviet citizen knew about devices for the prevention of all kinds …
Fair Competition in the Paralympics
The history of disabled people participating in sport is closely allied with modern thoughts and techniques of rehabilitation and recovery from injury. In the 1940’s one of the earliest pioneers of disabled sports, Sir Ludwig …
Pathway to the Modern Olympic Polyclinic
Doctors (and later nurses, physiotherapists, nutritionists, and other biomedical staff) have been present at the Olympic Games from the very beginning but the pathway to modern Olympic polyclinic can only be described as adventurous. In …
De Arte Gymanstica – The Art of Exercise Prescription
Although books dating back to ancient Chinese, Indian, Arabic, Greek and Roman civilisations contained numerous accounts of physical therapies (Galen reports that Roman emperor Julius Caesar used electric fish to treat neuralgia, for instance), De …
The Physiotherapy that Time Forgot
In 2018 I experienced “physiotherapy” from many years ago; at the Igalo Spa in Herceg Novi, Montenegro. That’s not me in the photo above, just an indication of what is to come. To give some …
A history of physiotherapy at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney, Australia
In 1889 lectures and exams on the subject of ‘the massage battery’ were given to trainee third year nurses, who initially carried out practical work in massage and electricity in the Royal Prince Alfred (RPA) …
Mobilising a Profession: Geoffrey Maitland
…Maitland’s emphasis on very careful and comprehensive examination leading to the precise application of treatment by movement and followed in turn by the assessment of the effects of that movement on the patient, form the …
A New World of Physiotherapy
Nearly 70 years after its inauguration, the World Confederation for Physical Therapists (WCPT) transformed into World Physiotherapy on 30 June 2020 with the launch of their new website at www.world.physio. The idea of creating an international …
Australian Physios Preserving their Past
The following edited excerpts are from the article titled “Preserving our Past: Why physio history matters”. It was published in the Australian Physiotherapy Association’s (APA) InMotion Magazine on 3 February 2020 and describes the current …
History’s Greatest Physios
On the 125th anniversary year of the commencement of the Society of Trained Masseuses in the United Kingdom, one of the seminal moments in the history of the profession, the International Physiotherapy History Association (IPHA) …