Movement is
the oldest medicine

CHAPTER 1

Ancient exercise prescriptions

"Exercise instead of medicine" is not a modern idea. Doctors were writing "walking" on their prescriptions 2,500 years ago.

Herodicus, the doctor who tried too hard

Herodicus, who lived in Greece in the 5th century BC, was both a gymnastics teacher and a physician. The philosopher Plato recorded him as the first person to use gymnastics as therapy. His prescriptions, however, could be brutal. Plato's Phaedrus tells how he made patients walk from Athens to Megara and back, a distance of dozens of kilometers each way.

His reputation was mixed. Plato mocked him for "dragging out the lives of the sickly," and Hippocratic writings even criticize him for killing feverish patients with excessive exercise. In other words, the lesson that exercise is medicine but the dose matters goes back that far.

Hippocrates and walking

Regimen, a text handed down under the name of Hippocrates, the father of medicine, describes in detail how to stay healthy by balancing food with exercise and walks. Exercise was "prescribed" according to a person's constitution and the season.

"Walking is man's best medicine."— Widely attributed to Hippocrates, though the original source has not been confirmed.

Galen, physician to the gladiators

In the mid-2nd century, Galen, the greatest physician of the Roman era, worked as physician to the gladiators in his hometown of Pergamon. Treating bodies cut by swords and broken bones every day, he learned the structure and recovery of the body firsthand. He later wrote On Exercise with the Small Ball, praising a game in which a group passes a ball back and forth as "the best exercise, working the whole body evenly and delighting the mind as well." Even a 2nd-century doctor knew that people stick with exercise when it is fun.

CHAPTER 2

Gymnastics becomes therapy,
and machines arrive

Pehr Henrik Ling, father of Swedish gymnastics

In 1813, Pehr Henrik Ling of Sweden founded the Royal Central Institute of Gymnastics in Stockholm. He divided gymnastics into four branches: educational, military, medical, and aesthetic. "Medical gymnastics" became the root of today's physical therapy. The school continues today as the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences (GIH).

The world's first gym: the Zander Institute

In 1865, Swedish physician Gustav Zander opened an "Institute for Medico-Mechanical Gymnastics" in Stockholm equipped with 27 machines. Using levers, weights, and springs to adjust resistance, they were designed to let even weak patients exercise at a precise intensity. Later came machines driven by steam and electric motors. After winning an award at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Zander institutes spread around the world, and the machines are now called the ancestors of modern gym equipment.

Unlike today's gyms full of heavy iron, the starting point was rehabilitation. Pilates apparatus, which adjusts resistance with springs, and GYROTONIC equipment, which uses pulleys and weights, both belong to this lineage.

CHAPTER 3

War and epidemics
grew rehabilitation

The two World Wars and the polio epidemics of the 20th century injured countless people. To get them back on their feet, rehabilitation became a profession and a science.

Reconstruction Aides and the birth of physical therapy

During World War I, the U.S. Army recruited women to care for wounded soldiers and called them Reconstruction Aides. Using massage and exercise to get soldiers walking again, they were the direct predecessors of today's physical therapists. When the war ended and the program was about to disappear, Mary McMillan and her colleagues met at a restaurant in New York and founded an association with $2 dues. In March 1921, McMillan was elected its first president, and the group later became the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA).

Elizabeth Kenny, the nurse doctors ignored

In the early 20th century, the standard treatment for polio was to immobilize stiff limbs with splints and casts. Elizabeth Kenny, a nurse working in rural Australia, did the opposite: she relieved spasms with hot packs and taught the muscles to move again.

Doctors did not trust the methods of a "country nurse." When she went to the United States in 1940, she was turned away in New York and Chicago, but doctors in Minneapolis and at the Mayo Clinic recognized the results. The Kenny Institute opened in Minneapolis in 1942, and in the early 1950s a Gallup poll ranked her No. 1 among the women Americans most admired, ahead of Eleanor Roosevelt. The U.S. Congress even granted her the privilege of entering and leaving the country freely without a visa.

Howard Rusk, father of rehabilitation medicine

During World War II, Howard Rusk, a medical officer in the U.S. Army Air Forces, saw convalescing soldiers doing nothing but lying in hospital beds. In 1942 in Missouri, he started a recovery program that combined exercise with vocational training. The program grew to 12 Air Forces convalescent centers, and after the war he founded an institute of rehabilitation medicine at New York University (today's Rusk Institute). That is where the nickname "father of rehabilitation medicine" comes from.

Rusk also has deep ties to Korea. That story continues in Chapter 7.

Ludwig Guttmann and the beginning of the Paralympics

Ludwig Guttmann, a Jewish neurosurgeon who fled the Nazis to Britain, opened a spinal injuries unit at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in 1944. At the time, people with spinal cord injuries were not expected to live long, but he got patients out of bed and used sport as therapy.

On July 29, 1948, the very day the London Olympics opened, an archery competition with 16 wheelchair athletes was held on the hospital lawn. These "Stoke Mandeville Games" were held as an international event for the first time in Rome in 1960, and that event is now recognized as the first Paralympic Games.

1. 1917–1918U.S. Army Reconstruction Aides

   The starting point of physical therapy as a profession

2. 1921American Women's Physical Therapeutic Association founded

   Mary McMillan as first president; later the APTA

3. 1942Kenny Institute · Rusk's recovery program

   "Don't keep them lying down. Get them moving."

4. 1948Stoke Mandeville Games

   Wheelchair archery on the opening day of the London Olympics

5. 1960Rome Games

   Now recognized as the first Paralympics

CHAPTER 4

The betrayal of the bed

When you're sick, you should rest? Strict bed rest, medical common sense until the mid-20th century, turned out to be more dangerous than anyone thought.

"The Dangers of Going to Bed"

In 1947, British physician Richard Asher published "The Dangers of Going to Bed" in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Point by point, it showed that lying in bed for long periods causes blood clots, bedsores, pneumonia, muscle loss, and kidney stones, and it is still read in medical schools as a classic. Around the same time, early ambulation, getting patients walking soon after surgery, spread, and after World War II prolonged bed rest disappeared for many conditions.

Three weeks in bed vs. thirty years of aging

In 1966 in Dallas, five healthy 20-year-old men took part in an experiment: three weeks of doing nothing but lying in bed. The results were shocking. Their cardiorespiratory fitness dropped sharply, and it took eight weeks of training to recover.

Thirty years later, the researchers called the same men back. Measuring their fitness in their 50s, they found something remarkable: three weeks in bed at age 20 had reduced their fitness more than thirty years of aging.

CHAPTER 5

Joseph Pilates, the sickly boy

Born in Germany in 1883, Joseph Pilates is said to have been a sickly child who suffered from asthma, rickets, and other ailments. He studied gymnastics and many other forms of exercise, training his weak body himself.

Exercise instructor in an internment camp

When World War I broke out, he was in England. Because he was German, he was interned in Lancaster and then moved to the Knockaloe camp on the Isle of Man. There he taught mat exercises to his fellow internees.

939 Eighth Avenue, New York

Around 1926, on the ship to America, he is said to have met Clara, who would later become his wife. The two opened a studio at 939 Eighth Avenue in New York, in a building that happened to house dance studios. Injured dancers began to come, and choreographers George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, as well as Martha Graham, the mother of modern dance, became his clients.

He did not call his method "Pilates" but "Contrology": the study of controlling the muscles with the mind. He published Your Health in 1934 and Return to Life Through Contrology in 1945. He taught in the same place for about 40 years, and after his death in 1967, his wife Clara and his students carried on the studio.

Adjust resistance with springs, so that even a weak body can move with precision.— Reformer · Cadillac · Chair · Barrel: all of Gabby Studio's Pilates apparatus come from this principle.

CHAPTER 6

The dancer who fell on stage,
Juliu Horvath

The story of GYROTONIC begins with a dancer's injury. Born in 1942 in Timișoara, Romania, to a Hungarian family, Juliu Horvath was a gymnast and swimmer. He began dancing at 19 and was so talented that by 21 he had become a principal dancer with the Romanian National Ballet.

Defection, and New York

In 1970, while on tour in Italy, he decided to leave communist Romania. After six months in an Italian refugee camp, he was granted asylum in the United States and settled in New York. He danced with the New York City Opera, appeared as a guest dancer at Radio City Music Hall, and toured with the legendary ballerina Margot Fonteyn.

A ruptured Achilles tendon

While he was a principal dancer with the Houston Ballet, a ruptured Achilles tendon ended his dance career. In 1977, the dancer who had fallen on stage left for the Caribbean island of St. Thomas. He built a one-room cabin himself and spent six years immersed in yoga and meditation, searching from scratch for the movements that would bring his body back to life.

From "Yoga for Dancers" to GYROTONIC

Returning to New York in the early 1980s, he taught "Yoga for Dancers" at the Broadway dance studio Steps on Broadway, in Central Park, and at his own White Cloud Studio. This class, done on a chair and mat with wave-like movements of the spine, is today's GYROKINESIS®.

To take these movements deeper, he began building equipment out of wood himself: machines that use pulleys, weights, and rotating wheels to guide the body through circles and spirals. This is GYROTONIC®. The name combines the Greek "gyro," meaning to turn, with "tonic," meaning stretching or tension. Before he found a manufacturing partner in the late 1990s, he is said to have built more than 400 machines by hand.

If Pilates teaches "alignment and stability,"
GYROTONIC teaches "the flow of circles and spirals."— Gabby Studio uses both methods together, matched to the condition of each body.

CHAPTER 7

Rehab in Korea,
from the ruins of war

The history of rehabilitation in Korea began with the Korean War.

1949: the first physical therapy at Severance

In February 1949, American Methodist missionary Thelma B. Maw began offering physical therapy to general patients at Severance Hospital. This is recorded as the starting point of physical therapy in Korea. The following year, the Korean War broke out.

Rusk comes to Korea

The war left countless amputees. By a 1959 estimate, disabled veterans who had lost arms or legs alone numbered more than 20,000, and with civilians the total exceeded 50,000. In early 1953, Howard Rusk, whom we met in Chapter 3, came to Korea leading an American-Korean Foundation survey team. Later, with support from the United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency (UNKRA), a rehabilitation center was established in Dongnae, Busan, making prosthetic arms and legs and providing vocational training.

Around the same time, Prof. Oh Jung-hee, who served as medical director at a national rehabilitation institution, became the first in Korea to use the term "rehabilitation medicine."

1. 1949Physical therapy begins at Severance Hospital

   Missionary Thelma B. Maw

2. 1953Rusk and the American-Korean Foundation survey team visit Korea

   Leading to the rehabilitation center in Dongnae, Busan

3. 1959 · 1963Yonsei pediatric rehabilitation center · amputee rehabilitation center

   The beginning of hospital-based rehabilitation

4. Mid-1960sPhysical therapist licensing introduced

   Established as a profession

5. 1972Korean Academy of Rehabilitation Medicine founded

   Started with about 50 members

6. 1986National Rehabilitation Center opens

   The hub of national rehabilitation care

7. 2000sPilates and GYROTONIC spread in Korea

   Rehabilitation exercise moves out of the hospital and into daily life

SOURCES

References

• Plato, Republic 406a–b · Herodicus (Wikipedia)
• Hunan Museum — Daoyin Tu (Mawangdui Daoyin Tu)
• GIH — History (P. H. Ling)
• Smithsonian — Gustav Zander
• Encyclopedia Titanica — Gymnasium
• APTA Timeline — Mary McMillan
• MNopedia — Sister Kenny Institute
• Howard A. Rusk (Wikipedia) · O&P Library (1959) — Korea
• Paralympic History — 1948 Stoke Mandeville Games
• RCP — Richard Asher · ScienceDaily — Dallas Bed Rest Study 30-year follow-up
• National Geographic — Pilates & the prisoner-of-war camp
• GYROTONIC® — Juliu Horvath · History of the GYROTONIC® Equipment
• History of Physical Therapy in Korea (KoreaScience, in Korean)

This article offers general historical information and is not a substitute for medical diagnosis or treatment. We will recommend exercises suited to your condition after a consultation.