Exercise in education and medicine / by R. Tait McKenzie.

  • R. Tait McKenzie
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Exercise in education and medicine / by R. Tait McKenzie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    seasons of neglect, popularity usually due to the personality and skill of an operator, or school of operators, and neglect following its indiscriminate use by unskilled persons. In the middle of the last century Beveridges’ rubbers were well known in Edinburgh, and their success carried it from that medical center throughout Europe. It then declined, but has been revived on a more solid and scientific basis by Fox, Norstrom, Graham, and especially by Mezger, of Amsterdam, whose classification is the one hab¬ itually followed to the present day. It is universally employed by athletic trainers to aid the elasticity and power of an athlete’s muscles before a contest and to remove the fatigue fol¬ lowing exertion. In medicine a great impetus was given to its employment by Ling and his disciples in Sweden, and it now forms part of the Swedish system of remedial gymnastics. Its recognition as a therapeutic agent has been delayed by the failure to distinguish between true massage and unskilled rubbing, which merely requires muscular strength, a certain manual dexterity, and good will. To be a successful masseur one must possess these qualities before beginning the training necessary to learn its possibilities, but its practice should be preceded by an intimate and special knowledge of anatomy, the disposition and thickness of muscle groups, their septa, the point where muscle changes to tendon, the situation and course of the veins and arteries, and their anastomoses, the location of the nerve-supply, the movements of a limb, and the changes about the joint caused by movement, the situation and extent of synovial cavities and tendon-sheaths. This knowledge should be practical and con¬ tinually confirmed or corrected when the parts are at rest and at work. In addition to this there must be that touch, firm, insistent, yet gentle, that adapts itself to the hills and hollows of the body surface as if by instinct, and a buoyant constitutional vigor to withstand the exhausting character of its practice. It is for the reasons above enumerated that the practice of true massage is limited to the few that are willing and able to devote the time and study necessary for the thorough acquirement of its technic.