Present Swiss Concepts of Rheumatism and Physical Medicine.

This paper is intended as a report on some results of recent work in physical medicine and rheumatology in Switzerland. Since 1940 education in physical medicine, including medical hydrology and climatology, has been compulsory for all medical students. Thus there are chairs for physical medicine in all medical faculties; three of these are professorships, yet several institutes for physical therapy are dependent upon other hospital departments. At Geneva and Basle there are separate departments; but only at Zurich is there a fully independent clinical institute with departments for in-patients and out-patients. As the recent investigations of the Institute for Physical Therapy at Zurich represent an important part of the work done in the field of physical medicine and rheumatology in Switzerland during the past years, I shall give a brief survey of this work. The chronic rheumatic diseases are a very important object of physical therapy; later on we shall speak about the reasons for this fact. Thus, an essential part of the work on which I have toreport deals with problems of rheumatism.