During the past fifteen years there has been a belated but gratifying growth in appreciation of the varied beneficial influences of physical therapy. Strange that one of the oldest therapeutic fields known to mankind should have waited so long to be recognized with other major factors of the medical armamentarium. As far as extension of physical therapy to the public is concerned, however, for rich and poor alike the surface has been hardly more than scratched.
In his recent address before the thirty-sixth Annual Congress on Medical Education and Licensure in Chicago, Gregg1 remarked:
A curious phenomenon in American medicine is the deft elimination of much reference to physical therapy. Almost as those who keep their children ignorant of the facts of life, we appear to protect the American medical student from the knowledge of physical therapy, mindful, I suppose, of the abuses imputed to osteopaths and chiropractors.... But