Oral History and Physical Therapy: The Importance of Physical Therapy History

Abstract

The study of physical therapy history in Canada has focused mainly on the profession's origins and its development alongside medicine after World War II. 1 While it is important to document our professional origins, our history also includes local and broader community narratives across the country that need to be studied and celebrated. While physical therapy scholars have embraced the diversity of research orientations, approaches, methods, and modes of analysis in their work, one research genre that has not received much attention is oral history. 2 Adopting an oral history approach can facilitate inquiry focusing on physical therapy community effortsnarratives that have not been reproduced or showcased in our documented history.In this editorial, I briefly discuss oral history, its origins, and its unique qualities and strengths as a form of academic inquiry. I then offer a few examples of oral history/history articles written by physical or occupational therapists and show their implications for the physical therapy profession.

Where history is concerned: an editorial for the special issue on physiotherapy history

“…This is not to say, of course, that physiotherapy does not have historians or histories of its work. Alongside centenary histories, we have strong academic scholarship from people like Anders Ottosson (Ottosson, 2005(Ottosson, , 2011(Ottosson, , 2016a(Ottosson, , 2016b; Thomas Terlouw (Terlouw, 2007a(Terlouw, , 2007b; Beth Linker (Linker, 2005a(Linker, , 2005b(Linker, , 2011(Linker, , 2012(Linker, , 2013; and others (Benjamin, 2015;Dixon, 2003;Gilman, 2014;Ingham, Mohr, Walker, and Mabey, 2013;Moffatt, 2012;Morus, 1999;Wikström-Grotell, Broberg, Ahonen, and Eriksson, 2013;Yoshida, 2013). However, we have no public historians of physiotherapy history like Roy Porter (Porter, 1990(Porter, , 1997, and it is rare to see historians outside the profession itself showing an interest in physiotherapy's development as a profession, as we have seen elsewhere (Borthwick, 1999;Bacon and Borthwick, 2012;Fournier, 2002;Nettleton, 1992Nettleton, , 1994Rose, 1996Rose, , 2001Saks, 2001Saks, , 2003.…”