The expressive efficiencies of American Delsarte and Mensendieck body culture

Boundary work: the Mensendieck system and physiotherapy education in Norway

The history of physiotherapy can be seen as a history of boundary conflict, as the profession sought to first establish, then maintain, its distinctive professional identity. Traditional approaches to the sociology of the professions support this, seeing professionalization as an ongoing process of enclosure, encroachment, and conflict. Recent work, however, has emphasized the fluidity and collaborative nature of professionalization projects, and placed more emphasis on inter-professional negotiations and disciplinary coexistence. In this paper, we draw on this work to analyze the harmonization of the independent Mensendieck System of medical gymnastics in Norway, and the emerging state-sponsored physiotherapy system. Our contention is that over the course of the middle decades of the 20th century, advocates of the Mensendieck System and providers of orthodox, biomedically informed physiotherapy, came together and found a way to work collaboratively in a shared space without compromising their distinctive professional identities. We argue that this approach both points to ways we might revisit traditional conflict-based analyses of the history of physiotherapy, while also suggesting new ways of imagining how the profession might change in the years to come.

"Stand up straight": notes toward a history of posture

The essay presents a set of interlinked claims about posture in modern culture. Over the past two centuries it has come to define a wide range of assumptions in the West from what makes human beings human (from Lamarck to Darwin and beyond) to the efficacy of the body in warfare (from Dutch drill manuals in the 17th century to German military medical studies of soldiers in the 19th century). Dance and sport both are forms of posture training in terms of their own claims. Posture separates 'primitive' from 'advanced' peoples and the 'ill' from the 'healthy.' Indeed an entire medical sub-specialty developed in which gymnastics defined and recuperated the body. But all of these claims were also part of a Western attempt to use posture (and the means of altering it) as the litmus test for the healthy modern body of the perfect citizen. Focusing on the centrality of posture in two oddly linked moments of modern thought--modern Zionist thought and Nationalism in early 20th century China--in terms of bodily reform, we show how "posture" brings all of the earlier debates together to reform the body.

Seeing your way to health: the visual pedagogy of Bess Mensendieck's physical culture system

This essay examines the images and looking practices central to Bess M. Mensendieck's (c.1866-1959) 'functional exercise' system, as documented in physical culture treatises published in Germany and the United States between 1906 and 1937. Believing that muscular realignment could not occur without seeing how the body worked, Mensendieck taught adult non-athletes to see skeletal alignment and muscular movement in their own and others' bodies. Three levels of looking practices are examined: didactic sequences; penetrating inspection and appreciation of physiological structures; and ideokinetic visual metaphors for guiding movement. With these techniques, Mensendieck's work bridged the body cultures of German Nacktkultur (nudism), American labour efficiency and the emerging physical education profession. This case study demonstrates how sport historians could expand their analyses to include practices of looking as well as questions of visual representation.