moving stories and images
Agnes Wenham, a physiotherapist who trained in Sweden and England, was a well-known character in the profession, especially in Johannesburg, where she practised for many years. She moved to South Africa from the United Kingdom as a young woman and worked …
It is rare to find physiotherapists writing about their experiences (Nicholls, 2021), which makes Olive Millard’s (1952) autobiography Under My Thumb so important. A summary of Millard’s professional career is written by Goldstone (2024) and is further summarised here: Becoming …
Before the restoration of Ukraine’s Independence in 1991, rehabilitation occurred within the Soviet paradigm, which set itself in opposition to Western ideology – not out of rational consideration, but out of the need to be different. Some of the key …
On the 8th September 1951, delegates representing seventeen national physiotherapy associations met in Copenhagen, Denmark to establish the World Confederation for Physical Therapy (WCPT); now World Physiotherapy. Seventy-five years later it represents more than 600,000 physiotherapists through 129 member organisations, …
Worldwide, due in part to the current situation of the COVID-19 pandemic, the history of our profession is becoming a hot topic. We can draw inspiration from the beginnings of our profession, and model after …
Australia was the first country in the world to teach and examine all aspects of physiotherapy: exercise, massage and manipulation, and electrotherapy, in programmes aligned with universities. Early physiotherapists were not nurses, and men were …
University of the Witwatersrand In 1924 the department of physiotherapy had been established in the Johannesburg Hospital and had been opened to patients in September 1925. Dr EB Woolf had been appointed as head of …
Although it’s less than ideal, video meetings do, at least, allow us to record and disseminate get-togethers. Here’s a link (Password: 6E$+34Y0) to yesterday’s biannual IPHA whole group meeting. The 2nd half of the meeting is …
Last week we received an email from Professor Cecil Larochelle who sent us some fantastic writings on the history of French physiotherapy. See the list of references below. R. Remondière, Réhabiliter Deménÿ, Annales de Kinésithérapie, …
By Karoline Munsch and Sandra Schiller Over the years, quite a number of oral history projects have been conducted in physiotherapy, for example in the USA (https://www.apta.org/History/OralHistories/), the United Kingdom (http://sami.bl.uk) and New Zealand (https://100yearsofphysio.org.nz/oral-histories/). The …
Landry et al make a good point in their recent editorial connecting the outbreak of infectious diseases with the need for rehabilitation (Landry et al., 2020). They suggest that ‘physiotherapy can mediate the deleterious pulmonary, …
Hydrotherapy: An integral part of physical medicine. This video clip (circa 1952) available from the Wellcome library shows the benefits of therapeutic touch conveyed through a range of treatments used in rehabilitation, including exercise, massage and …
In 1921 a small group of masseurs in Cape Town banded together to form the Certified Masseurs Association, primarily to rehabilitate soldiers after World War I as well as the patients affected by the polio …
Notes on the relationship between physiotherapy and the medical profession in the early days of the National Health Service In the early days of the UK National Health Service (which came into being on 5thJuly, …
