Tag: Featured

This is a collection of our latest and greatest content from our talented writers.

Historical Electrotherapy Equipment on Display

Avid historians at McGill University, Canada have curated a display of intriguing physiotherapy equipment dating back to the Gaiffe Nerve Stimulator, c1860.  Sarah Marshall PT Fellow, Faculty Lecturer, School of Physical & Occupational Therapy, and …

Blinded ex servicemen training as Masseurs, one of whom was Leonard Howell who lost his sight at Highwood on the Somme in 1916.

Lest We Forget

At the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month – we will remember them. The Armistice (Latin = “to stand arms still”) agreement to end the hostilities of the First World War …

The History of Light Therapy

Historically, light treatment has roots in ancient Egypt, India, and Greece, as “heliotherapy” (natural sunlight) for the treatment of skin diseases. Modern phototherapy (artificial light) has its origins in the latter part of the 19th …

A Micro History of Physiotherapy in Italy

If we accept the etymology of physiotherapy as phìsis (natural) therapy, one of the oldest practice might seen in be the use of vapour grottoes in the territory of Sciacca (South of Italy) since the …

Charles Fayette Taylore

America’s first Physical Therapist

Whilst Mary McMillan is lauded as the mother of the American Physical Therapy Association, the nation’s first ‘practitioner’ was more likely Charles Fayette Taylor, who brought the therapeutic exercises and massage of the Swedish Movement …

Olga Capatina in Afghanistan in 1987

Interview with a Russian physiotherapist, soldier, spy and double agent

My name is Olga Capatina. I was born in Moldova, in the North, on the banks of the Dniestr in 1955. My parents were also Moldavian. In fact, they were Romanians before WWII, but after …

The Glass Room

Physiotherapy gymnasiums are rarely located within architectural splendour but for a short period in communist Czechoslovakia, a hospital physiotherapy department was located in one of the great buildings of European modernism. UNESCO World Heritage Listed …

Physiotherapy is Handling: Then and Now

The seminal paper “Physiotherapy is Handling” was presented by Joyce Williams at the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy (CSP) Founders’ Lecture at the CSP Annual Congress in 1985 and was reproduced in the Physiotherapy Journal in …

Physical Therapy’s Oscar Winning Film

On the 75th anniversary of its production we look back at the profession’s 1949 Oscar winning film. ‘Toward Independence’ is a 1948 American short documentary film about the rehabilitation of military veterans with spinal cord …

The New Zealand Private Practice Boom

In the years before 1974, private physiotherapy practices were few and far between in New Zealand. Patients either paid the full cost of treatment themselves, or claimed against private insurance schemes which had highly unregulated …

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