The first recorded use of the word was in Germany, where in 1851 the military physician Lornz Gleich coined the term ‘Physiotherapie’. The word was independently Anglicised to ‘Physiotherapy’ in Canada in 1894 when Dr Edward Playter published in the Montreal Medical Journal. In both cases the word was used by medical practitioners to describe the collection of natural or physical interventions.
The first National Professional Association outside of Medicine to use the term was in 1922 in the United States – the American Physiotherapy Association, forerunner to the American Physical Therapy Association. Other English-speaking national professional associations followed the American lead and also changed their names to the more modern and encompassing term Physiotherapy – South Africa in 1932, Canada in 1935, Australia in 1939, the United Kingdom in 1944 and New Zealand in 1949. Subsequent European language derivations of the Physio prefix, such as Fiso, Fisio, Fysio and others, followed into parent countries and their colonies throughout Africa, Asia and the Southern America’s throughout the second half of the twentieth century.
Just as the American’s led the change to Physiotherapy they also led away with their change to Physical Therapy in 1947. With powerful post war geopolitical influence, some other nations with nascent professional associations followed their lead. Meanwhile France resolutely utilises masseur-kinesitherapie. Nevertheless, the action of the profession’s global peak body to change its name to World Physiotherapy in 2020, acknowledging the majority of the profession, is a watershed moment of global acceptance of the word.
Why have associations of hybridised masseurs, remedial gymnasts and electrotherapists appropriated a medical term and fought for its ownership beginning in 1922, but still not completely some 100 years later?
This project seeks to shed light on the subject by exploring the deliberations of the leadership of the profession when name changes were mooted.