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. Predominantly British migrants brought their skills and knowledge in the primary fields of massage, therapeutic exercise and/or electrotherapy to their new home and began to practice in rooms. Whilst the term ‘physiotherapy’ was not adopted in Australia until 1939 the practise could be described to have commenced when the three primary fields coalesced into a single service. This story explores the evidence of that first happening in Australia in the later nineteenth century and the remarkable woman who made it so.

Harriet Elizabeth Rowell was born in Brighton, England on the 5th of January 1852. Her father was Phillip George Rowell, watchmaker and jeweller. The third of eleven children, little is known about Harriet’s childhood, but she grew up in a family that were very sport minded. Swimming, riding, cycling and rifle shooting were popular. Harriet’s forte was swimming and as a young adult she gave lessons at Charles Brills baths. In 1875, Harriet, using the name Elphinstone Dick so as to be able to compete with men, completed a six mile (10km) open water swim from Shoreham to Brighton. The Brighton Gazette reported that the first mile was completed in about 13 minutes. Within another half an hour more than half the distance had been undertaken. Unfortunately, her colleague Helen Saigman was to suffer severe cramp, forcing her to leave the water. Dick persevered and the newspaper observed that,

Miss Dick, still being fresh and undaunted continued on her journey. These young ladies have accomplished the greatest swimming feat of the present day with the exception of Captain Webb’s Channel trip.’

In the 1870’s Brighton was one of the few cities in England where gay people lived and met. Dick formed a relationship with a younger woman named Caroline Mercy (Alice) Moon, daughter of a prosperous local doctor Henry Moon. In Victorian times being in an openly gay male relationship could bring about retribution and social ostracism, whilst women on the other hand could live in a gay relationship, because the public preferred denial of such happenings.

On the 6th of December 1875, Dick and Moon boarded the Newcastle, for four months of rough sailing to migrate to Melbourne, Australia. At the time Melbourne was the richest city in the world with the vast amounts of money made from gold, timber, wool and meat converted into substantial stone villas and public buildings. Opportunities for entrepreneurs were all around and for two years Dick earned an income from giving swimming exhibitions, teaching swimming and entering swimming races at Captain Kenney’s St Kilda sea baths. Moon is thought to have had access to family money but her name appears on swimming school posters so it is likely she was also teaching.

With her swimming feats Dick soon became a well known Melbourne identity. Etchings and cartoons of her appeared in local publications such as The Australasian Sketcher, Illustrated News and Table Talk. Dick taught the daughters of Lady Roma Bowen, wife of the Governor of Victoria, to swim. Lady Bowen, a keen promoter of sports for women, presented Dick with a gold bracelet inscribed with the words,

Presented to Miss Elphinstone Dick by her Melbourne pupils in recognition of her successful efforts to promote the art of swimming among the ladies of Victoria, and in admiration of her skill as a swimmer and her efficiency as a teacher, April 16, 1878”.

Despite their success, unfortunately there was not enough interest in swimming for the pair to make a living at it.

On the 6th of May 1878 Dick and Moon returned to England. Dick undertook training in physiology, anatomy and medical gymnastics at a London institute for the treatment of deformities, under Dr Mathias Roth and his son Dr Bernard Roth. Roth senior was Hungarian by birth and studied medicine in Vienna and Padua. He settled in London and eventually became a physician in the Hahnemann Hospital. Roth senior had attended gymnastic classes run by one of Swede Pehr Henrik Ling’s disciples, Carl August Georgii. He became so enthralled by the Swedish Method that, in 1857, he started his own classes. Roth senior published and lectured on the subject and was a staunch proponent of physical education. He even named his second son Henry Ling Roth in honour of his Swedish hero, and his fourth son Reuter Roth later migrated to Sydney and as a medical practitioner was a founding member of the Australian Massage Association (later the Australian Physiotherapy Association).

Meanwhile Moon’s father settled a sum of money for her, and in 1879 she and Dick returned to Melbourne where they used the funds to set up the Ladies Gymnasium in Collins Street. This is believed to be one of the first of its kind established in Australia.

The Ling Method or Swedish Gymnastics justified a regime of exercise based on its curative and therapeutic affects on bodies. Where exercise was considered, at the time, to be dangerous to women’s reproductive systems, the Ling Method was based on ‘scientific principles’ that could correct defects and enhance good childbearing. It was also ‘pleasingly’ feminine in its emphasis on good deportment, grace, flexibility and coordination; without being unseemly or boisterous. Dick and Moon’s timing was fortuitous, as the Swedish system was being seen around the world to be superior to the mechanical and less fluid German system presently taught in Victorian schools.

The gymnasium was popular with the new breed of independent career women, such as school teachers. The teachers realised the advantages of having their female pupils instructed in swinging Indian clubs, dumb bells, figure marching and free wand jumping, so the pair were well employed by Melbourne’s private girls schools.

Dick and Moon’s growing reputation extended to the medical community, especially as they undertook not to treat any case without first consulting a physician. The Australian Medical Journal recommended the ladies to their readers and reconfirmed their recommendation three years later. The Journal reported that Miss Dick had gone through the “professional training” necessary to qualify her as a teacher of gymnastic exercises and their “intelligent application”, whereas Miss Moon’s qualifications were that she was the daughter of a doctor and willing to work under medical supervision and authority. The pair’s gymnasium was recommended as,

..an establishment to which the profession may confidently send such of their lady-patients as require the well-considered application of the sort of exercise that is necessary for the recovery of muscles [wasted by disease or sickness].

By 1881 Dick and Moon had 190 pupils and a year later were travelling by train 115km every Wednesday to the gold mining town of Ballarat for swimming and gymnastic instruction at the behest of the Education Department.

Dick also lectured publicly and in September 1887 the Melbourne Herald reported,

..an exceedingly interesting as well as practical lecture on dress in its relation to health, was delivered by Miss Dick of the Ladies gymnasium, in the Masonic hall South Melbourne”.

The article reported Dick criticising the popular stiff clothing of young females and recommended the wearing of woollen garments next to the skin. This was a period when metal stays, wire frames and cushions were sewn into dresses to make them fashionable. She also blamed mothers for encouraging ill health in their children by the way they dressed them. Dick spoke at length on footwear and covered the “intimate features of women’s health”.

Tiring of gymnastics, Moon became enamoured with the prospect of rural life, moving to the outskirts of Melbourne to establish an organic poultry farm. However her enthusiasms tended towards the transitory. In 1888 she gave up poultry-farming to set up the “The Central” Luncheon and Tea Rooms back in the city. Meanwhile Dick needed to keep the Gymnasium functioning. Early in the 1880s Josephine McCormick had begun attending the Gymnasium, and by 1887 she had joined Dick as co-principal.

From the mid 1880s the gymnasium pupils gave a series of exhibitions in the Melbourne Town Hall. The program for the 1890 display includes an extraordinary list of patronesses from the upper echelons of Melbourne society, including the Countess of Hopetoun, Lady Clarke and Lady Loch. Of note on the program were a list of services available at the gymnasium, which also included “massage, with electricity”. Combined with the therapeutic exercise of Swedish Gymnastics they were the very services of early physiotherapy.

Moon, ever volatile, decided to move to Sydney and devote herself to journalism and writing. Dick followed her in May 1893. In Sydney she established another gymnasium but Moon, in her late thirties, died in 1894, apparently of heart disease, although suspicions of murder exist.

In 1898 Dick returned to Melbourne with friend Margaret Montgomery but despite the fact that McCormick had continued to give both hers and Dick’s names as Principals during Dick’s sojourn in Sydney, Dick did not choose to re-join her colleague. Dick opened her own school of physical culture and medical gymnastics in Collins Street with Miss G E Gaunt in April 1899.

Dick passed away, aged 50, on 8th of July 1902. The death register entry shows the place of her death as South Brighton, her occupation as masseuse, and cause of death is heart failure.

There are many aspects of Dick that are admirable, including her physical swimming prowess, her ability to navigate a lesbian relationship whilst in the public eye, her entrepreneurial and business acumen, and her pioneering spirit. However most impressive was her self-awareness and humility. Where Dick could have simply opened a ladies gymnasium in Melbourne based on her swimming credentials alone, she opted to travel back to England to learn from the great experts of the era so that she could better serve the health of her clients.

References

Editor. (1879). Miss Dick’s Gymnasium. The Herald, Melbourne, Vic, 3 April, 3. Accessed online at https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/246225273.

Elsaesser S and Butler AR. (2014). Nineteenth century exercise clinics for the treatment of scoliosis. The Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 44(3), 240-246.

Hinkins, L. (undated). Harriet Elphinstone-Dick. Bright and Hove Museums website. Accessed online at https://brightonmuseums.org.uk/discovery/history-stories/harriet-elphinstone-dick/.

Ingleton. S. (2019). Making Trouble (Tongued with Fire): An Imagined History of Harriet Elphinstone Dick and Alice C. Moon. Spinifex Press: Melbourne.

Martyr, P. (1994). The professional development of rehabilitation in Australia, 1870 – 1981. Doctoral Thesis of University of Western Australia. Accessed online at https://api.research-repository.uwa.edu.au/ws/portalfiles/portal/40720174/MARTYR_PHILIPPA_1994_compressed.pdf

Otzen, R. (1998). Recovering the past for the present: The history of Victorian calisthenics. In Lilith (Ed.), A feminist history journal, 96 -112. Accessed online at https://search.informit.org/doi/pdf/10.3316/ielapa.635040110056580?download=true.

Salt, W. (2008). Harriet Elizabeth Rowell who swam as Miss Elphinstone Dick. St Kilda Historical Society website. Accessed online at https://stkildahistory.org.au/images/People/harriet_elphinstone_dick/big_race_article.pdf