Francoise Wall

French Kinesitherapist (1909-1991), inventor of the muscular concept of Chain and initiator of the Method Wall. With the eyes of many professionals, it revolutionized rehabilitation and brought a new vision of human mechanics.

Historical context

Scientific work is indissociable charismatic and high personality colors of this woman who marked her pupils and amorça a turning of kinesitherapy.

The woman

Put at the door of the family hearth at the 16 years age by an authoritative father, the young girl must assume herself all alone. Parallel to many odd jobs, it is tested, successfully, with the fencing and horsemanship. True autodidact, it is almost by chance that it is brought to undertake studies of kinesitherapy, while working during the night to pay his studies.

Fruit of the Second world war and the epidemic of Poliomyelitis which followed it, the profession is being born. The optics of this original kinesitherapy is founded on the recovery of the muscular force. Severely wounded persons, then paralyzed hardly leaving other options.

Thereafter, this therapeutic option is transformed into dogma, doctrinaire approach. All the pains, all the dysfonctions are allotted to a hypothetical lack of force, all the deformations are caused by an improbable inaptitude to resist harmful gravity.

The treatments only consist in reinforcing, still and always. Divergences between the various schools confining itself at points of detail, alternatives around the unceasingly revisited topic of the musculation and the profit of force.

Francoise Mézières makes her studies at the French School of Orthopedy and Massage of the street Cujas in Paris, under the direction of Boris Dolto. She obtains her diploma of state the day before the evacuation of Paris in front of the projection of the German troops. She learns the techniques there from the time, in particular the “corrective gymnastics”, founded exclusively on the muscular reinforcement

Birth of a method

The shortly after the war, the school of the street Cujas finds its trace and asks him to come to teach. In spring 1947, whereas it has just finished the drafting of an opuscule, a kind of compilation of the remedial gymnastics of the time, it does what it will call thereafter its “princeps observation”.

Princeps observation

" When a sumptuous morning of spring 1947, we saw entering our cabinet a patient presenting superb a " cyphose" , we were well far from us to doubt that our profession and the fate of legion of patients was going to be changed. It was about a subject longiligne, very large and thin. A corset of leather and iron had caused, not enraiement awaited progress, definitely inexorable, of sound badly, but of the bruises on the hips and around the shoulders, and still seven vertebrae were with sharp as well as the lower angle of the scapulas. But the patient did not complain any and it came because it could not raise the arms any more nor to work. We tested, naturally, the exercises of " rectification " and the work of dorsal in order to strengthening the " bungee cords " back, but the stiffness was such as nothing was not possible. Extending then our patient with ground, in décubitus dorsal, we pressed on the shoulders and we saw, with our amazement, to occur an enormous lumbar lordosis whereas, examined upright, the patient absolutely only one dorsal kyphosis presented. To avoid adding an evil to that which existed already, we rocked the basin behind by bringing the knees on the abdomen and, with our new stupor, we saw the lumbar hyperlordose thus unobtrusive referring to the nape of the neck, the head reversing ourselves behind without it being possible to bring back the chin close to the neck.

the door on the truth was, in front of us, large open but us remeltings of us there to engage and, doubting our eyes, we renewed several times the experiment and, finally, in front of a colleague.

… Our princeps observation was so unexpected, the noted facts if surprising for a Petri expert of orthodoxe theories, if admiring towards its Masters whom it held, up to that point, for erudite truths, that it did not want any to believe his eyes. But the insolente truth was so obvious that he sought then, hopelessly, to see there an exception which would have confirmed the sacro-holy rule. It was necessary to be resigned to the sacrilege and to reconsider the bases of orthodoxy. Remained to release the laws of this absolutely ignored physiology, to discover the mechanisms of them. Then the pangs of the apostasy the delights of the heresy succeeded. It is indeed an unutterable joy of checking at every moment, and in thousand ways, cogency of a theory, such that she luminously explains the causes of all the dysmorphisms and on what undoubtedly curative" can be built a technique; .

In the years which follow, it checks that its princeps observation has scientific value, i.e. it inevitably reproduces under the same conditions of experimentation. In 1949, it publishes “Revolution in orthopedic gymnastics”, an article founder which receives a mitigated reception, not to say frankly hostile, on behalf of the French medical world. It leaves the street Cujas and settles as a liberal to put his principles into practice and to continue its research. It is only well later, in 1984, qu' it will state the 6 laws which explain the phenomena observed at the time of the princeps observation of 1947. It works out a method which, although stammering, is already in its eyes more effective than the traditional techniques than it taught itself before little time.

The quarry

For want of anything better, it gives its own name to its incipient method. The medical world accommodates its discoveries with little enthusiasm when he does not testify a frank hostility to him. The “system Wall” is it far too different for the medical Establishment often famous conservative? Is this woman too atypical and too not very diplomatic? Undoubtedly there is a little all that in the rejection which it perceives and which affects it. It is the crossing of the desert. In same time, the patients come by far to be made look after and some kinesitherapists start to badger it so that it organizes a teaching. What it will carry out, almost unwillingly, in the Poitevin Marsh initially, Gers then. The Seventies are remembered by a clap of thunder: the exit of the book of Therese Bertherat “the body has its reasons” (ED Threshold). Some pages are devoted there to Mézières and its method. The work is an international success and Wall, well in spite of it, becomes a celebrity. She is decorated with the Légion of honor, one hears it with the radio, one sees it on television. Consequently, its work is plagiarized, scotomisée, denatured. It is the quarry. The preserving profession takes the train moving and tries phagocyter the message, by presenting it as “a weapon moreover in the large range of therapeutic body”. It is defended like a fury: if its theory is exact, it is the negation even of this therapeutic range and the traditional doctrines. The whimsical schools, raising its name such money, abound. They sometimes more have the direction of the marketing of real talent. That will take part of the terrible bitterness of the end of its life. In order not to leave the free field, she will almost teach to her last breath. She dies in Noisy-on School on October 17th, 1991 without to have guaranteed only one school, only one group or only one association claiming itself of her name.

Readings

Wall wrote only three opuscules and some articles. They all are exhausted and its sole legatee, did not make them republish. Only one work recalls its life and its work.

References

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