Medical gymnastics and the Cyriax collection.

Medical gymnastics is the use of physical exercise as therapy or to maintain health. In modem times the virtues of a regular workout or a jog around the park are so widely recognized as to need no justification, and the respectability of physiotherapy is well established. However, this has not always been the case. Tracing the historical development of physical culture, from the Greeks to the modem gym, sheds interesting light on changes in the conception of the body and of what it means to be healthy. The Wellcome Institute Library has a fascinating and diverse collection of material on this subject, including archives, pictures and manuscripts as well as printed books. There have recently been exhibitions in the library highlighting these works, some of which spent long mysterious years waiting in the stacks and have been catalogued only within the last couple of years. The collection has arisen from various origins (for example, we have the archives of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, an extremely valuable resource), but the one which predominates is the personal library of Edgar F Cyriax (1874-1955), acquired in 1956. Cyriax was a practising physiotherapist and an apostle of Swedish gymnastics. He studied the subject at the famous Kungliga Gymnastiska Centralinstitut in Stockholm, with such enthusiasm that he even married the daughter of its director, Henrik Kellgren. He moved with her back to London and set up his own "mechanotherapeutics" practice there, which he continued to run for the rest of his life. He also devoted his energies to publishing numerous papers and articles on medical gymnastics-including a bibliography,2 and above all he was a voracious collector of printed material relating to the subject: we have his own manuscript catalogue of his collection.3 Clearly a believer in practising what he preached, he was himself very fit: he played rugby, cycled to work