Tag: Australia
Eliza McAuley – Pioneering Educator
Eliza McAuley was born on 1866 in Upper Plenty, Australia – a rural area just north of Melbourne, Victoria. Her background is unclear, with her father identified both as a farmer (McMeeken, 2016a) and a …
Best-Known Man in Adelaide
On the 17th January 1890, 21-year-old Hugo Leschen of Adelaide, South Australia was travelling to Stockport on the North train. Just as the steam engine pulled into the station a commotion broke out in a …
The Fall of Singapore
Following the First World War, Australia concluded that Japan’s expansionist ambitions in the Pacific posed the greatest threat to its national security. Britain was equally determined to protect its Asian territories — India, Burma, Malaya …
Dubious Electrotherapy
The word physiotherapy was used by many different practitioners in the first part of the twentieth century; including French physicians, American electrotherapeutists and later British radiologists as medical radiation was first grouped with electrotherapy. The …
My European Study Tour
In 1903 Australian proto-physiotherapist Josephine McCormick visited the principal physical culture institutes of Europe, in London, Paris, Vienna and Berlin. She also undertook courses of study with orthopaedists Professor Adolf Lorenz of Vienna, and Dr …
Australia’s First Physiotherapist
Physiotherapy emerged from nursing and hospitals in the United Kingdom, and later physical education and the military in the United States. In contrast, physiotherapy began in Australia in private practice. Migrants, predominantly British, brought their …
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 …
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 …
The Machinations of McKenzie
Editors Note: Robin McKenzie is a great of physiotherapy, but as it often the case with those who create change, it comes at great expense – often to others. Former acolyte David Poulter recently shared …
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 …