 For thousands of years massage, or touching with hands, has been used to heal or relieve a patient. For the ancient Greek and Roman healers massage was one of the basic means of treatment and pain relief.
Because of the negative attitude towards the body and the related pleasure, during the Middle Ages the massage was not very popular in Europe. In XVI century, however, the use of massage as an effective healing therapy was resumed mostly thanks to a French doctor – Ambroise Paré. Later, in XIX century, the Swede Per Henrik Ling created a massage system which is known nowadays as ‘Swedish massage’. It is a synthesis of his knowledge in gymnastics and physiology in combination with Chinese, Egyptian Greek and Roman massage techniques. The first school, in which massage was included as part of the curriculum, was founded in Stockholm in 1813. After that massage and manual therapies began to be applied in different hospitals and sanatoriums throughout the Continent.
Even nowadays, in some remote parts of the world like the Amazon jungle, massage is a basic means of healing, applied by the local healers with remarkable success. |
