Coming in the Front Door A History of Three Canadian Physiotherapists Through Two World Wars

摘要

The devastation of industrialized warfare of the First World War provided an abundance of patients needing help to re-educate wasted muscles or learn to use prosthetic limbs. The Canadian military medical establishment gradually realized the usefulness of "functional re-training" for wounded soldiers and set up schools to train physiotherapists. Not thinking ahead, the schools were closed at war's end. However, in the interwar years some far-sighted women developed a university training program and a regulating organization so that by the Second World War physiotherapists were in a position to significantly contribute to the war effort. The wartime development of this female-dominated profession will be shown through the stories of three Canadian women of successive generations.