Alison M. Wrynn

‘A debt was paid off in tears’: Science, IOC politics and the debate about high altitude in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics

The 1968 Olympics in Mexico City are best remembered for many significant events including the student riots that occurred outside the venues prior to the opening ceremonies, the protests by African-American athletes on the medal stand, the drug-testing of athletes for the first time, and the sex-testing of female athletes. Prior to the Games, however, the most hotly debated topic surrounding the Games was what might be the effect of high altitude on athletic performance. The 1968 Mexico City Olympics are an ideal vehicle through which the history of scientific, particularly physiological, research in relation to athletic performance can be examined. The goal of this study is to initiate a greater understanding of the place of scientific research within athletics, and more specifically, within the Olympic Movement, by focusing on the influential debate about altitudes impact on athletics in the years leading up to the Mexico City Games.

Contesting the Canon: Understanding the History of the Evolving Discipline of Kinesiology

How do we remember the past in the discipline of kinesiology? What is the connection between memory and history? The conjunction between these two topics has in the past decade become a focus of increasing interest in the broader field of historiography. How do we locate our past in a field that has evolved in a number of ways in the past century? For instance, Delphine Hanna is remembered in nearly all physical education histories as the first woman to be named a full professor of physical education in 1903. Actually, Eliza Mosher, MD was named a full professor at the University of Michigan in 1896. Why is it that she is excluded from nearly all the histories in physical education? The discipline will be better served if our public, shared memories are more consistent with the reality of our history.

Dr. Frances A. Hellebrandt: Pioneering Physiologist, Physiatrist, and Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Program Visionary

The story of Frances Hellebrandt, MD, physiologist and physiatrist, is unfortunately unknown to most physical medicine and rehabilitation (PM&R) physicians, physicians in other medical specialties, and even physical therapists. During her long life and illustrious career, she was a prolific writer, researcher, administrator, and educator. She published on a broad range of topics in exercise physiology, physical education, physical therapy, and PM&R. She investigated the properties of muscle, the science of exercise, and the pathophysiology of muscle disorders. She studied the process through which new sport-specific motor skills were acquired and refined. She made a lasting scientific contribution because of an intense commitment to establishing a research foundation and research capacity for these developing fields. However, because she worked in a variety of disciplines during her career and often did transdisciplinary work, she is not always remembered in the histories of these individual disciplines. Hellebrandt’s work in educating, training, and collaborating with others, including many women scientists and physicians, makes hers a vital legacy that must not be forgotten. Hellebrandt became a physician in 1929 at a time when there were very few women in medicine aside from those who trained in women’s medical colleges and in the few land grant programs, for example, the University of Wisconsin, that accepted female students. In fact, there was a decline in the number of women physicians practicing in the United States from 1900-1950 [1]. Many medical schools closed after the Flexner Report was published in 1910, due to the new standards that were established for medical training, in particular, those training female, black, and working-class students [2,3]. In 1900, there were 7 women’s medical colleges, but, by 1930, the year after Hellebrandt graduated from the University of Wisconsin, only one remained, the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (which is now absorbed, along with Hahnemann University, into Drexel University College of Medicine). Enactment of the Flexner Report recommendations to emphasize training in the scientific foundations of medical practice caused medical education costs to greatly increase and, therefore, put medical education out of the reach of nearly everyone but affluent white men. The percentage of women who graduated from medical schools remained below 5% until the 1970s when Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act of 1972 opened the doors for greater equity across all fields in education [4]. As Barkin et al [3] rgue, “Although the decrease in female medical students may have been multifactorial, the ransformative dream shared by the pioneering female physicians at the beginning of the 0th century faded within a decade of the Flexner report.”

The Athlete in the Making: The Scientific Study of American Athletic Performance, 1920–1932

Several factors contributed to the growth of interest in studying athletic performance through a scientific lens in the 1920s and 1930s in the United States. First, there was a rapid proliferation of international as well as national athletic competitions following the First World War. Second, there was the growth of the various research and clinical specializations that make up modern biological science. However, there has been little historical research on how American coaches and athletes made use of the information the scientists and physicians found in the laboratory setting in these decades. This article explores this process.

Eliza Maria Mosher: Pioneering Woman Physician and Advocate for Physical Education

Through her work as a prison physician, prison superintendent, college physician, college professor and university dean, Eliza Mosher touched in a substantive manner nearly every health-related career that women entered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moshers benchmark work in the profession of physical education was of particular importance at a time when the field was just emerging. In a profession that accepted women on nearly equal terms with men from the outset, it was of importance that women of substantial academic and professional merit participated in the formative years of the fields chief professional body, the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education. Mosher was such a woman.

Hurdling Over Sex? Sport, Science, and Equity

Between 1968 and 1999, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) required all female athletes to undergo genetic testing as part of its sex verification policy, under the assumption that it needed to prevent men from impersonating women and competing in female-only events. After critics convinced officials that genetic testing was scientifically and ethically flawed for this purpose, the IOC replaced the policy in 1999 with a system allowing for medical evaluations of an athlete’s sex only in cases of “reasonable suspicion,” but this system also created injustice for athletes and stoked international controversies. In 2011, the IOC adopted a new policy on female hyperandrogenism, which established an upper hormonal limit for athletes eligible to compete in women’s sporting events. This new policy, however, still leaves important medical and ethical issues unaddressed. We review the history of sex verification policies and make specific recommendations on ways to improve justice for athletes within the bounds of the current hyperandrogenism policy, including suggestions to clarify the purpose of the policy, to ensure privacy and confidentiality, to gain informed consent, to promote psychological health, and to deploy equitable administration and eligibility standards for male and female athletes.

A fine balance: Margaret Bell--physician and physical educator.

Margaret Bells life illustrates the limited opportunities for women in higher education in addition to the restrictions they faced when attempting to control their narrow sphere of professional influence. Bells career is also an outstanding exemplar of connections physical education had with health and medicine in its early years and the shift that occurred by the mid 20th century that made physical education an increasingly separate, specialized field. Her service ethic, interest in research on menstruation and physical activity, and work as a university health service physician provides an interesting illustration of the balancing act that women in physical education at the university level were expected to live in the middle decades of the 20th century.

Sex, Drugs, and Kinesiology: A Useful Partnership for Sport’s Most Pressing Issues

From the gender controversy of South African runner Caster Semenya to the doping practices of disgraced American cyclist Lance Armstrong, recent sporting issues highlight kinesiology’s important role and responsibility to sport. Increasingly, sport organizations, such as the International Olympic Committee, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and international federations, have turned to academics to help navigate their sport science issues. Such complex, cross-disciplinary problems require researchers versed in kinesiology’s sub-disciplines and familiar with problem-based inquiry. Though such cross-disciplinary practices are familiar to kinesiologists, their familiarity only indicates kinesiology’s potential impact on the major issues sport is currently addressing. Kinesiology must be a field comprised of scholars equally comfortable with empirical and humanistic research while at the same time applying their cross-disciplinary knowledge to some of sport’s most pressing issues. Kinesiology ought to consider more collaborative venues for scholars from across its sub-disciplines to work together on complex, cross-disciplinary research.

On the Margins: Therapeutic Massage, Physical Education and Physical Therapy Defining a Profession

The American physical therapy profession emerged during and following the First World War as a result of the need for trained providers of therapeutic exercise – who practised under the supervision of a physician – for the rehabilitation of injured soldiers. Most of these pioneer physical therapists came to the profession with a background in corrective exercise developed in womens physical education programmes at a variety of colleges and universities throughout the country. A number of scholars have examined the therapeutic exercise components of physical education that migrated their way into physical therapy practice but less focus has been placed on the use of massage as a therapeutic tool in physical therapys earliest years. Recently, Danish historian Per Jorgensen began to analyse the connections among massage practice, physical therapy and chiropractic in Denmark from 1900 to 1930. My central question focuses on an analysis of how the practice of massage was used in physical therapy, and the ways in which massage practitioners and physical therapists interacted and established their respective scope of practice in the first half of the twentieth century in the USA.