History of PetMassage

We are continuing a long tradition. We can easily visualize a family of cave dwellers squatting on rocks in the night around a campfire. Light from the flames illuminates their faces. They crouch, methodically rubbing their backs, shoulders, and arms that they’d strained earlier in the day hunting, gathering food and stripping wood for basket weaving. People intuitively rub or put pressure on cramped or injured areas to ease the pain.

We know that dogs have been companions and hunting partners with man since the earliest of times. Bones of dogs have been found along with early human remains and other archeological artifacts. Dog and humans had a symbiotic relationship, each providing services to the other. In return for scraps of food and shelter, (they were begging at the table even then) early dogs would alert the early humans to danger and may have assisted them in tracking and hunting.

How much of a leap is it to visualize an injured dog limping into the circle of warmth and protection around the fire; comforted and attended by the compassionate touch of the caveman, medicine woman or cave kid? This was the beginning of animal massage. Massage is the earliest, oldest, most natural and most instinctive human self-health and animal-health care.

Sourced in love and nurturing, it is the first, the most basic, the most natural, and the most fundamental health care. One of the earliest love stories was between a person and a dog. Touch is the earliest health care for people and animals.

This Egyptian scene, in which a hyena is being chased by dogs, was sketched on limestone between 1555 and 1080 BC.
(Ref:http://personal.uncc.edu/jvanoate/k9/k9inart.htm, accessed January, 2009.)

History of Massage

Some form of massage or "laying on of hands" has been used to heal and soothe the sick in every culture since people have been touching each other.

To the ancient Greek and Roman physicians, massage was one of the principal means of healing and relieving pain. In the early fifth century BC, Hippocrates - the "father of medicine" - wrote: "The physician must be experienced in many things, but assuredly in rubbing...for rubbing can bind a joint that is too lose, and loosen a joint that is too rigid."

Pliny, the renowned Roman naturalist was regularly rubbed to relieve his asthma and Julius Caesar, who suffered from epilepsy, was daily pinched all over, to ease his neuralgia and headaches. After the fall of Rome in the fifth century AD, little progress was made in Europe in the sphere of medicine and it was left to the Arabs to study and develop the teaching of the classical world. Avicenna, the eleventh-century Arab philosopher and physician, noted in his Canon that the object of massage was "to disperse the effete matters found I the muscles and not expelled by exercise."

During the Middle Ages, in Europe, due to the contempt for the pleasures of the flesh, little was heard of massage. But it was revived in the sixteenth century mainly through the work of a French doctor, Ambroise Pare. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a Swede by the name of Per Henrik Ling developed what is now known as Swedish massage, synthesizing his system from his knowledge of gymnastics and physiology from Chinese, Egyptian, Greek and Roman techniques. In 1813 the first college offering massage as art of the curriculum was established in Stockholm and from then on institutes and spas that included massage sprang up all over the continent. Today, the therapeutic value of massage has been recognized once more. It continues to flourish and develop throughout the world, both among lay practitioners and professionals.

In the East, massage has continued in an unbroken line since earliest times. Massage has always been more valued for its healing applications than in the West. Perhaps the difference that has, until very recently, existed between Eastern and Western attitudes to massage, stems from the scientific revolution which took place in the West some 250 years ago. As a result of this Western science, older concepts which linked the body to the mind and spirit were discounted as unscientific. The human body came to be regarded as a kind of sophisticated machine, which could be serviced and maintained only by highly trained and specialized people - in other words, doctors.

The poor country people continued to combine the instinctive desire to "rub it better" with skills refined and elaborated by long tradition and lent authority by the "barefoot doctor" knowledge of Oriental medical theory, bone-setting and manipulative techniques. Shiatsu originated from this traditional type of massage, as practiced in Japan, and as it gained recognition it became enriched by further influences from classical acupuncture theory, and from Western influences of osteopathy and chiropractic, newly imported to Japan.

The beginnings of reflexology are unknown - it may well have sprung from the ancient art of Oriental pressure point therapy. But, whatever their precise origin, it seems certain that it was in use in ancient Egypt, as evidenced by the wall paintings and hieroglyphics." The Book of Massage, Lidell, Lucinda, Fireside Book, 1984