Swedish massage was named by a Dutchman, not invented by a Swede
Pehr Henrik Ling is often hailed as the father of massage and the inventor of the Swedish style. He wasn't. The phrase Swedish massage system was coined in 1868 by a Dutch practitioner, Johan Georg Mezger, who also gave its five basic strokes the French names still used today.
Massage means rubbing or kneading the body's soft tissues, usually with hands but also with elbows, knees, feet or devices, mostly to ease stress or pain. The word reached English from French, and its deeper root is uncertain: candidates include an Arabic verb meaning to touch, the Portuguese amassar, to knead, Latin massa, dough, and a Greek verb for working with the hands. Ancient Greeks called the practice anatripsis; Romans said frictio.
Traces appear across the ancient world, from China and India to Egypt and Mesopotamia. A tomb at Saqqara dated to 2330 BC shows two men having their hands and feet worked on, possibly massage. A Middle Assyrian tablet from between 1363 and 912 BC records the word muššuʾu among remedies for foot complaints. The Chinese medical classic Huangdi Neijing mentions massage in 30 chapters, and in AD 581 China created a massage department inside its Office of Imperial Physicians. Thailand's tradition, nuad thai, became UNESCO intangible cultural heritage in 2019.
Europe learned of the Chinese system in 1776, when French missionaries in China translated summaries of the Neijing. The same year Ling was born; in 1813 he became principal of a gymnastics institute in Stockholm and built what he called the Swedish Movement Cure, though he and his assistants wrote little about their methods. Mezger's five strokes run from effleurage, long gliding sweeps, and petrissage, lifting and kneading, through friction and brisk tapotement to vibration.
Two New York physicians, George and Charles Taylor, brought Ling-based massage to the United States in the mid-19th century. Its standing slipped during the medical advances of the 1930s and 1940s, then revived in the 1970s, especially among athletes. By 2005 Shanghai alone had an estimated 1,300 to 2,000 foot massage centres. For all its popularity, the scientific evidence on massage is generally low to moderate in quality, inconsistent, and thin on lasting clinical effects.
Source: Massage
