Ged Quayle is a professional massage therapist living and working in Liverpool in the UK.
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Introduction
Hippocrates
Avicenna
Per Henrik Ling

picture said to be hippocrates, click for larger version

5th century bas relief, said to be of Hippocrates.
 The history of massage probably begins before we could properly call ourselves human. We instinctively rub a pain or an ache, we instinctively stroke a bruise. We use touch in healing without thinking about it, which suggests that it's very, very old.

But in the 5th century BCE Hippocrates, the Greek physician, called it Anatripsis and wrote:
Anatripsis can relax, brace, incarnate, attenuate: hard anatripsis braces, soft relaxes, much anatripsis attenuates, and moderate thickens.
"The physician must be acquainted with many things and assuredly with anatripsis, for things which have the same name have not always the same effects, for rubbing can bind a joint that is too loose, or loosen a joint that is too hard."
 
  The classic Chinese medical text Huang Ti Nei Ching Su Wen ('The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine') recommends :
"When the body is frequently startled and frightened, the circulation in the veins and arteries ceases, and disease arises from numbness and the lack of sensation. In order to cure this one uses massage and medicines prepared from the lees of wine."
In all likelihood the Nei Ching was written somewhere late in the first millennium BCE, however it's plausible, indeed probable, that it was a codifying, a writing down, of a far older oral tradition. Our view of the body may have moved on since then, and I have to confess I have no idea what the 'medicine prepared from the lees of wine' might be but if you go on to the stress resources in the study section, compare that 'frequently startled and frightened' to Hans Selye's General Adaptive Syndrome, particularly the resistance phase. Nothing changes. 		Picture of the Three Emperors. Click for larger version.
the three emperors, Fu Hsi, Shen Nung, and Huang Ti, credited with the foundation of Traditional Chinese medicine. From a scroll by Seibi Wake, Japan, 1798.
  Julius Caesar had 'pinching' to ease his neuralgia (an extreme form of massage but massage nonetheless), and in the first century AD the Roman physician Celsus devoted seven of the eight volumes of his De Medicina to prevention and therapeutics, including 'rubbing'.  
  Turkish Massage. Traditional woodcut.Ali al-Husayn Abd Allah Ibn Sinna (980-1037), the Persian physician known in the West as Avicenna, wrote 16 books on medicine, 68 books on philosophy and theology, 11 on astronomy and science, and 4 of poetry. I know for a fact that he mentioned and used massage, but can I find a reference to it anywhere? Can I flip. We'll come back to Avicenna, and if anyone can help let me know.
  And then history (or my poor research skills) grind to a halt. We know that there were bone setters working throughout medieval Europe, but history is written by the strong and the literate and the powerful; we know what adult men in power had for breakast, but of life as it was lived by ordinary people, not so much.  
Portrait of Per Henrik Ling on a Swedish postage stamp. Actual size The story leaps forward to Per Henrik Ling (1776-1839). Technically Ling developed a system of medical gymnastics known as 'The Swedish Movement Cure' of which massage was only a small part. In some ways Ling deserves to be better known as the father of school PE (or PT) than he does as the father of modern massage. In hindsight we know that Ling's massage was borrowed pretty much intact from the Turks, who still used (use) it in the 'Turkish Bath', or Hamam, however Ling himself was Swedish, so his system became known as Swedish Massage.

One of the mysteries of Swedish Massage is why a system borrowed from the Turks by a Swede ended up using French terminology. No-one's entirely sure; Ling's patron was the then king of Sweden, Charles XIV, who was French, but the French terms were introduced in Holland. It's not unlikely that Per Henrik Ling's day job was involved; he was fencing master at the Swedish Royal Military Academy; to this day the terminology in fencing is in French.

Further reading 1 Further reading 2

  Roughly around the beginning of the 20th century we have to start distinguishing between three emergent paths. Massage is being used in hospitals and in the sex industry. Very different types of massage, as I'm sure you were smart enough to work out for yourself, working towards very different goals, but the confusion is with us today. The third strand was born out of a new science being developed in the cultural and intellectual hothouse that was fin de siécle Vienna; Psychoanalysis.

Strange Loops

By the 1920s the new science of Psychoanalysis was facing a problem - was it a science? It depended on dream analysis and free association, how could this be consistent from case to case? If a circus owner dreamt of a white horse, did it mean the same as a farmer? A cavalry officer? A recovering alcoholic? Could response to and meaning of dream imagery really be the same, reapeatable, across all patients? If it wasn't repeatable and measurable, then it wasn't a science. And if it wasn't a science what was the point of it?

The problem was addressed by two men; Sigmund Freud's most gifted colleague, and arguably his most gifted student. Carl Jung had been a successful psychotherapist long before discovering Freud and his Psychoanalysis. Jung's search would be for a common language of dreams, a shared vocabulary of the unconscious; a collective unconscious. Eventually he would split from Freud and form his own school of psychoanalysis. The best promise for Freudian psychoanalysis would lie with a brilliant Austrian physician, a difficult and dazzling man, one of Freud's original students, regarded by many as the natural successor to Freud himself: Wilhelm Reich.

 
  Reich began typically for him by standing psychoanalysis on its head. He looked at the patient, and noticed that their posture, appearance and facial expression often completely contradicted what they were saying. People would insist vehemently that they were happy or relaxed, when their posture or facial expression were saying exactly the opposite. Reich believed that this gave him the chance to bypass the conscious mind and deal directly (he believed) with the unconscious, expressing itself through the body.

Reich began exploring the muscular state of his patients, and came to the conclusion that muscle tension was blocking the expression of the self. Actually Reich believed that the muscles were blocking more than just expression, but we'll come to that presently.

Reich finally decided that there were five bands of what he called armouring:

  1. eyes
  2. jaw
  3. throat
  4. chest
  5. waist
  6. belly
  7. pelvis
If you're particularly astute (or a shameless hippy) you may recognise similarities between Reich's armouring and another, much, much older, system. But again, we'll come to that presently.

The question of energy.

We said above that Reich believed that the body could block the expression of the self. He believed that the expression of the self depended on a flow of 'life energy', which he called orgone.

We talk a lot about energy, mostly as a shorthand for vitality, positivity. There are lots of people who believe in the literal truth of "energy" but in the end no-one's identified it and no-one has any real idea what it is. Certainly there is some energetic process going on or we'd be dead, but whether "simple" metabolic processes can be extrapolated to the "etheric" bodies or "auras" of some of the more involved energy beliefs is unknown. Do we have auras? No idea. Do we have etheric doubles? Absolutely not a clue, although Occam's razor is not the energy believer's friend here. Do we have dietary needs? Does lack of confidence take the shine off our day? Does being tired and run down make us feel dull and lethargic? That's the sort of energy we can deal with now and that's the sort of energy that has a real effect on people's lives. Etheric doo dahs be hanged.

Reich began as one of Sigmund Freud's most dazzling students, he ended up on a ranch shooting down flying saucers with a raygun powered by water (and orgone) waiting for his real father, a space alien, to rescue him.


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