722 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



In view of these facts, it need hardly be said that those who would 

 properly understand and apply massage should be familiar with its 

 past and present literature ; they should also be familiar not only with 

 the natural history of the maladies in which massage may be applied 

 when left to themselves, but also with the course of these affections 

 when treated in the usual approved methods, so that improvements 

 or relapses may be referred to their proper causes. Moreover, they 

 should know something about the methods of others who have any 

 claim to respectability in their manner of applying massage, so as to 

 compare them with their own. And yet all these qualifications may 

 fail if the operator has not in addition abundance of time, patience, 

 strength, and skill, acquired by long and intelligent experience. Meas- 

 ured by these requirements, I fear that good masseurs (manipulators) 

 are scarce. Dr. E. C. Seguin, in the "Archives of Medicine" for 

 April, 1881, says, that even in New York there are few manipulators 

 who can be trusted to do massage well. Massage may be studied as 

 a science, but it has, like everything else in medicine and surgery, to 

 be practiced as an art. Those who have a natural tact, talent, and 

 liking for massage, united with soft, elastic, and strong hands, and 

 physical endurance to use them, may be as useful artists in this de- 

 partment of the healing art as in others. It has been well said that 

 those who do massage should be tender and gentle, yet strong and 

 enduring. These are qualities that are rarely found combined in 

 manipulators. It is a very common mistake to suppose that those 

 who are of a remarkably healthy, ruddy appearance, plethoric and fat, 

 are the best fitted to do massage. Such people require a great deal of 

 exercise in the open air for the proper oxygenation of their blood, and 

 confining, in-door work, like massage, they soon find to be tedious 

 and irksome. Besides, the stooping attitude and varying positions so 

 often necessary while doing this sort of work soon put them out of 

 breath ; and thus, while suffering from their ignorance and awkward- 

 ness, they fancy they are imparting " magnetism " to their patients at 

 their own expense. Better that the manipulators should be rather thin, 

 though if of too spare a habit their hands will not be sufficiently 

 strong and muscular and their tissues generally will lack that firmness 

 necessary for prolonged endurance. 



One of the best German medical reviews, " Schmidt's Jahrbiicher," 

 in an extensive report on massage, thus indicates the esteem in which 

 this treatment is held by many eminent physicians and surgeons of 

 Europe : " It is but recently that massage has gained an extensive 

 scientific consideration, since it has passed out of the hands of rough 

 and ignorant empirics into those of educated physicians ; and upon 

 the results of recent scientific investigations it has been cultivated 

 into an improved therapeutical system, and has won for itself in its 

 entirety the merit of having become a special branch of the art of 

 medicine." Professor Billroth, one of the most eminent surgeons of 



