ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a more specific history of physical therapies; a history that is less concerned with accounting for a succession of events leading to the formation of the physiotherapy profession and more, with some of the critical discourses and influences that made the profession possible. It explores the important role physical therapies have played throughout recorded history and their role in helping medicine establish its pre-eminence in the 18th and 19th centuries. The chapter looks at the role the Industrial Revolution played in creating the surplus and luxury necessary to allow people to enjoy massage and other therapies as leisure pursuits. It examines the role that gender has played in the history of the physical therapies. Medicine is often portrayed as having a very masculine history, with its grounding in Enlightenment science, its inventors and technology. By contrast, physiotherapy was a profession founded by women and has remained female-dominated for its entire history.
