The history of massage is one of the most popular pages on my website. Interestingly enough it is also the website that is most plagiarized by others. Many people are usually interested in the history of massage to show it’s an acceptable method of treatment or they are looking for info for a massage school project. While the history of massage is not copyrighted – my version of it is. For the life of me I can’t figure out why people don’t understand that but this isn’t really what I am planning on writing about.
The real story is that most of what is written on my page on the history of massage was taken from bits and pieces from massage school textbooks. I gathered it a small piece at a time. Many of the books said similar things on each step in the time line. Unfortunately for the massage profession – most of it is wrong and I was corrected a long time ago by the historian for the massage profession -Robert Calvert who now has passed away. I was able to meet Robert in person a few times and talk about the history of massage. What is intriguing to me is how massage has been handed down through time and how we have gotten to the point of having so many laws and regulations about massage when in fact is was done for so long without. Also when I study the various types of massage and the history of each of those I often find that most come about out of need to heal the creator’s pain or someone in their family. They study what is known and spin it around into their own design finding what works and what doesn’t.
Last weekend I spent a whole afternoon perusing the Google Books section on the history of massage and put together an interesting collection of historical massage books on massage and the movement cure as it was once talked about. The books were written between 1850-1920 and most had a chapter on the history of massage. Now we don’t actually know if they actually had accurate info or were they all copying each other like we currently have in many current books. I would love to take the time to read all of those books and also look for other books to compare what they are saying and come up with more details on the history of massage.
The reason for doing such a project would be to learn more about ourselves and where we have come. The current trends in the profession seem to be headed toward more hours of education and more legislation. There is talk of degree programs in massage. Historically from what I read in the old books was that massage was once a 2-3 year training program and it was mostly done by doctors. It seems that more hours of training is needed to become more a part of the medical profession and to be accepted by the medical profession but we don’t really know if that is true. Here in WA State we are able to be contracted providers with insurance companies and doctors refer to us all the time. It came about mainly because of the work of a savvy insurance commissioner, Deborah Senn, who used to get massaged regularly by one of the massage professions political spokespeople, Lori Belenski who currently works for the Chiropractic association. We didn’t need any more than our 500 hours of training that is required for licensing. All we needed was a good insurance commissioner who loved massage and knew what it could do.
The old books also have quite a bit of case studies and research being done. I would love to know more about that early research because there weren’t any big influences like who is paying for them to be done – or maybe there was at that time – I guess I don’t know for sure.
So back to the history of massage and what it can do for our future. I believe that in studying our history we can get a clearer sense of ourselves and take a better look at just what we want it to become. How can we help more people with touch and massage? Could it be in getting back to having massage be a family activity being taught to sons to help their wives during child birth? As we gain more research and evidence that massage can help people be more healthy, will it be able to become an everyday event covered by insurance for preventative means? Could we see more programs like Massage for Peace and Touch to TEACH programs to support our communities? Does that take more education or just more money to start them? Could we as Robert Calvert spoke about in his book “The History of Massage” be less likely to repeat our past mistakes?
First up is to make sure that everyone knows that Per Ling was not the father of Swedish Massage! (See also Google Books excerpt from the History of Massage” and also this latest article from Judi Calvert on Massage Today)
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Well, I am also agree with your point about the Massage history that information about massage history is on almost every top web page. Massage in now days is becoming popular and is very good therapy to cure the diseases or for the body relax.
Having been in the process of pursuing the history of massage technique lineages in my own dilatory fashion for the last few years, what amuses me is that Ling is such a good example of the tendency toward the creation of modality empires, and the loss of history/lineage information that tends to ensue in the process. When you hear “father of” you rarely hear any emphasis that Ling studied Gutsmuth’s system of gymnastics from Nachtegall for 5 years and recast it into his own Swedish version. He was of course, very successful, and should be lauded for the business genius he was, for his persistence in getting the Swedish government to found the Royal Gymnastic Central Institute and becoming its director. It’s sort of like how so many people have been convinced that John F. Barnes invented myofascial release.
http://www.joancolemassage.com/jos/swedish/62-swedishhistory.html
As for medical (or gymnastic) training in the nineteenth century, it actually resembled massage training before AMTA got the licensing snowball going. Quite a free for all. You simply can’t generalize how much or what kind of training someone who called himself a doctor possessed. (Much less a massage therapist)
“As economist Reuben A. Kessel noted, “Medical schools were easy to start, easy to get into, and provided, as might be expected in a free market, a varied menu of medical training that covered the complete quality spectrum.” Many were “organized as profit-making institutions,” and some “were owned by the faculty.” (quoted from http://www.lewrockwell.com/archives/fm/08-90.html) It took from 1847 when the AMA was founded until 1900 until every state in the US had medical licensure laws.
I think the real lesson to learn from that spate of books between 1850 and 1920 might be the process of orthodox medicine attempting to coopt a system of folk medicine.