Tag: education
South Africa’s First Professor of Physiotherapy
On the 1st of January 1973, Jean Blair was appointed Associate Professor by the Council of the University of the Witwatersrand. She was awarded the honour, in the words of the Vice-Chancellor, “..on the grounds …
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 …
Stolen Statue
In 1812, the Swedish government approved Pehr Henrik Ling’s application to teach gymnastics in Stockholm and receive a salary and premises through state assistance. Ling had developed a comprehensive system that included pedagogical (physical education), …
Royal Central Institute for Gymnastics
In the early 1800s as the Napoleonic Wars were reshaping the European map. Sweden had Finland and its’ eastern provinces ceded to Russia, and to the west the Swedish-Norwegian union occurred. It was shock to …
An Irish Tale of the 2nd WCPT Congress in New York
Among my earliest memories is one of listening to my mother – Pat Webb, née Toner- talking about New York and the 2nd World Confederation of Physical Therapy (WCPT) Congress which she attended in 1956. …
Studying Physiotherapy Behind the Iron Curtain
My vocational training as a physiotherapist in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) offered me my first internship in 1968 at a Saxon Thermal Bath, a leading spa facility in the GDR for rheumatic diseases, specialising …
On the Origins of Netball
The international game of netball can trace its popularity and codification to a unique college of Swedish gymnastics in the United Kingdom at the turn of the nineteenth century. The all-female college was also at …
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 …
Seventy Years of Studenthood
Studying physiotherapy was as beautiful as it was difficult. Every physiotherapist was at some point a student; a period of their lives full of unique but familiar experiences. We asked physiotherapists from around the world …
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 …