A Brief History Of Massage

Massage is a successful tool for healing and has been practiced throughout the world for thousands of years. In adults as in babies, massage has many benefits from a preventive health perspective as well as stimulating the body's own natural healing mechanisms to aide in the recovery from trauma, depression, back pain and physical or emotional stresses.

As early as the 13th century tactile stimulation for babies has been known to be a matter of life or death. George Howe Colt's article in Life magazine (August 1997 issue) recounts the historian Salimbene's report of the German emperor Frederick II's experiment of 1248. He had the nurses deprive newborns of touch, sound and verbal communication. The babies never learned language - they all died before they could talk. Instinctual knowledge has always told us that touch is a primal need, as necessary as food and shelter for healthy growth.