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 word physiotherapy was also also used by ‘cultists’ like chiropractors and osteopaths, and untrained laypersons like cosmeticians, barbers and even as a metaphor for prostitution.

Abuse of the word physiotherapy by commercially-oriented electrotherapy equipment manufacturers, salesmen and operators, significantly tainted its reputation in the century’s first quarter. For example, equipment like electric belts, socks, and hairbrushes were widely available for direct purchase by consumers, with many marketed with the promise of curing everything from cancer to headaches. Such fanciful claims regarding effectiveness for nearly every condition and for conditions that would never likely be helped but of which many suffered, were made in the hope of making a quick sale. A terrific example of the latter is presented in the following article titled “Hope for the Bald”, which was published in Sydney’s The World’s News 100 hundred years ago.

“I want my lost hair restored,” “I’d like my tonsils shrivelled up,” or “Please put my shattered nerves right.” These, and many other requests like them, will be commonplace requests to doctors in future, if the newest invention of medical – electrical science eventually invades the consulting room. This is the latest physiotherapy “machine”.

There is, it is stated, only one so far in England, and it is in use in the consulting room, of a West End specialist. At first sight it might be mistaken for a a large pedestal gramophone. You sit down in a comfortable chair, a switch is turned on, and through your limbs is radiated the exhilarating high frequency electricity popularly known as violet rays.

Anyone seeking a cure for that dreaded spectre of middle age – baldness – can have his tired scalp stimulated into a hair-growing and literally hair-raising condition through a glass electrode, which imparts new life to the hair cells. He can at the same time hold a metal cylinder with both hands so that his whole system is tuned up. A tickling sensation is all that he feels.

“For ages baldness has defied a remedy,” said the specialist, “but with this new machine it can be cured in its early stages before the dying roots of the hair have entirely perished. Even if the trouble is long standing, more hair can be stopped falling out.

“Where it has come out In patches—a common type of baldness – it has not only been restored in several cases, but the former natural colour has returned.”

Coinicidentally, the very same year of the article’s publication, the increasingly powerful American Medical Association formed a Council of Physical Therapy, to amongst other things,

..investigate and report on the merits of non-medicinal apparatus and contrivances offered for sale to physicians or hospitals”.

Their actions helped removed the ‘snake oil’ salesmen from electrotherapy. Combined with the claiming of the word physiotherapy by masseurs and medical gymnasts of the USA in 1922, South Africa in 1932, Canada in 1934, Australia in 1939, the United Kingdom in 1943 and New Zealand in 1950, by mid century the word ‘physiotherapy’ was secured and stabilised in the anglophonic world. Meanwhile bald men continued to search for an elusive cure.

References

“The Council of Physical Therapy”. (1925). The Lancet, 206(5333), 1039-1040.

Desjardins AU. (1928). The Council on Physical Therapy. Journal of the American Medical Association, 91(14), 1025-1027.

Editor. (1925). Hope for the bald. The World News, Sydney. 25 May.

Gritzer G & Arluke A. (1985).  The making of rehabilitation: A political economy of medical specialisation, 1890-1980. University of California Press: Berkley.

Ruscoe GA, Schiller S, Jones RJ, MacDonald CA & McGrath RL. (2024). Physiotherapy: The history behind the word. Physiotherapy Theory and Practice, 40(11), 2469-2471.