The system of medical gymnastics which we owe to the labors of Per Henrik Ling and his successors at the Royal Normal School of Gymnastics (the “Central Institute of Gymnastics”) in Stockholm was brought to the attention of Americans as long ago as the early fifties (see p. 258). By the end of that decade writers on physical education had begun to refer to it under the name of “the Swedish movement cure,” and authors of manuals intended for school use were borrowing some of their exercises from this source. But to meet the needs of growing boys and girls Ling had also devised a system of school gymnastics. This had been further elaborated by his son Hjalmar (1820-1886), and teachers trained in the Central Institute, or by its graduates, were everywhere using it in Sweden, in common schools and high schools alike. Of the aims, content, and methods of this branch of the “Ling gymnastics” little or nothing was known in this country until near the close of the eighties in the last century. Hartvig Nissen, a native of Norway and the head of a “Swedish Health Institute” in Washington, D.C., began to use it with teachers and pupils in the Franklin school in that city in 1883, and with students at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, early in 1887. A Swedish gymnasium with its equipment was also shown at the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition held in New Orleans 1884-1885, in connection with the exhibit of the Bureau of Education, and Commissioner Eaton had placed Mr. Nissen in charge of this and other gymnastic apparatus. Other isolated instances might be cited, but it was not until 1889, however, that the claims of Swedish educational gymnastics were brought forward in the United States so prominently and stated with such clearness and cogency as to attract general attention. Boston was the center from which the movement radiated, and its initiation was due to the public spirit and liberality of Mrs. Mary Hemenway (1820-1894) and the executive ability of her assistant, Miss Amy Morris Homans, coupled with the thorough professional training and forceful personality of Baron Nils Posse (1862-1895), the agent who first made their plans effective and afterwards conducted an independent and vigorous campaign of enlightenment until his untimely death.

Baron Posse was born in Stockholm, Sweden, where his father, Baron Knut Henrik Posse, a major in the army, was at one time head of the Royal Army Staff College (Kungl. Krigshögskolan, at Marieberg). Both parents ranked among the Swedish nobility. The boy, an only son, was graduated from a private high school at the age of eighteen, and afterwards completed the fifteen-month course at the Royal Military School (Kungl. Krigsskolan, at Karlberg), and the two years of study and practice then offered at the Central Institute of Gymnastics, including medical as well as educational and military gymnastics. Meanwhile for five years he had been enrolled in the Swedish army, half of that time as a private and later as second lieutenant, first in the Life Grenadier Regiment and then in the Royal Svea Artillery. Outside of this formal training his fondness for physical activity led him to join the Stockholm Gymnastic and Fencing Club, the Gymnastic Association, the Rowing Club, and two skating clubs, and in fancy skating he won his title as amateur champion over some of the most accomplished masters of that art in all Sweden.

It was on his twenty-third birthday (May 15, 1885), that Baron Posse graduated from the Central Institute of Gymnastics. Three months later he was on his way to America, and in October, after a visit to Nissen, then vice-consul of Norway and Sweden in Washington, he took up his residence in Boston with the hope of interesting physicians there in medical gymnastics and building up for himself, with their coöperation, a practice in that method of treatment. The first attempts were not encouraging, and progress was slow, yet after three years of such efforts opportunity at length knocked at his door—an opportunity not of his own choosing, but it found him ready. In the interval he had been married to Miss Rose Moore Smith of Newburyport. Besides writing a sixteen-page pamphlet on Medical Gymnastics (Boston, 1887), he had also completed an abridged translation into Swedish of an article on Massage by Dr. Douglas Graham (Lund, 1889), and was at work on an English translation of the Swedish physician Björnström’s work on “Hypnotism: Its History and Present Development” (in the Humboldt Library of Science, New York, 1889). These labors help to explain that rare command of the language of his adopted country for which he was afterward conspicuous.

Mrs. Mary Hemenway, whose only son had given the new gymnasium to Harvard College in 1879, was herself widely known as one of the wealthiest women in Boston and as a wise and generous dispenser of her riches for the promotion of worthy objects, at home and elsewhere. The introduction of systematic training in sewing and of the kitchen garden and school kitchen into the city schools were among the results of her efforts. Together with Miss Homans, who has been called “one of her right hands” in the execution of such projects, she had been impressed with the need of some efficient system of physical training for school children. A friend suggested Swedish gymnastics, and spoke of the graduate of the Stockholm Central Institute of Gymnastics who was at that time living in Boston. Baron Posse was accordingly consulted, and in October of 1888 Mrs. Hemenway employed him to demonstrate the system in a course of lessons given to twenty-five or more women teachers gathered from the public schools. A small room on Boylston Place was leased for the purpose, and larger quarters, in Park Street, were afterwards secured.

On the twenty-fifth of the following June the Boston School Committee accepted her offer to furnish free training for one year, beginning in September, to “one hundred public-school teachers, who may be permitted to use the system in their school work, thus enabling your Honorable Board, and educators in general, to decide upon its merits by actual results produced upon the school children within the environment of the schoolroom.” At the same meeting the Board of Supervisors was authorized “to report in print upon the subject of physical training in the schools.” September 24 the committee accepted Mrs. Hemenway’s further offer to provide “a teacher of the Ling system of gymnastics for service in the Normal School for one year, free of expense to the city.” October 8 the Board of Supervisors reported, recommending “that the Ling system of gymnastics be the authorized system of physical training in the public schools,” and at the same meeting a letter was read in which Mrs. Hemenway expressed her willingness “to provide instruction, free of expense to the City of Boston, for those masters and submasters who may desire to make a thorough study of the Ling system for the benefit of the Boston public schools.” The report was laid on the table, but the offer was accepted two weeks later. Baron Posse continued to give instruction to all these various classes up to January of 1890. Several small normal classes were also organized in 1889, which mark the beginning of the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics, established and afterwards endowed by Mrs. Hemenway, and with Baron Posse as its first director. In his annual report dated March 31, 1890, Superintendent Seaver writes that these demonstrations of Swedish educational gymnastics had already been attended by “30 masters, 24 submasters, and 166 other teachers. These have imparted their knowledge to yet other teachers, so that there are now 360 teachers prepared to use the ‘Ling system’ in their classes. In addition to these may be counted 97 recent graduates of the Normal School, who have all received instruction in this system.”

Mrs. Hemenway and Miss Homans were also responsible for the calling together and successful conduct of that notable “Conference in the interest of Physical Training” which was held in Boston on November 29 and 30, 1889.⁠[282] From one to two thousand persons attended each of the four sessions, which were presided over by William T. Harris, United States Commissioner of Education, and addressed by many well-known educators and by representatives of a variety of systems. At the beginning of the second session Baron Posse set forth “The Chief Characteristics of the Swedish System of Gymnastics” in a masterly paper, followed by a demonstration of that system by a class of women under his leadership. One result of this wisely planned and persevering agitation of the subject was the action of the Boston School Committee taken June 24, 1890, in line with the report and recommendation of its committee on physical training presented two weeks before, which ordered “that the Ling or Swedish system of educational gymnastics be introduced into all the public schools of this city.” In November of that year Dr. Edward Mussey Hartwell of Baltimore was elected Director of Physical Training, to hold office from January 1, 1891.

Meanwhile Baron Posse had been succeeded at the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics by Claës J. Enebuske in the middle of January, 1890; but on the first of the following month he opened a gymnasium and training school of his own in the Harcourt building, on Irvington Street. The six years of life that remained were crowded with incessant teaching and writing. During this period, it is said, “gymnastics according to his methods were officially introduced into the public schools of fifty-two cities and towns, and into as many more private institutions and academies. Clinics for medical gymnastic treatment were established by him in most of the larger Boston hospitals, and instruction was given to the nurses of many hospitals in adjacent towns.” Summer courses for teachers and others were conducted at the Martha’s Vineyard Summer Institute (1890, 1891, 1892), in his Boston gymnasium (1892, 1894, 1895), and at Harvey, Illinois, while he was in charge of the elaborate exhibit sent to the Chicago World’s Fair by various Swedish gymnastic societies and athletic clubs.

A book more complete than anything published in the Swedish language, at the time it appeared, was his volume on “The Swedish System of Educational Gymnastics” (Boston, Lee and Shepard; New York, Charles T. Dillingham, 1890), republished the next year with additions. In a third edition (1894), considerably enlarged, the title was changed to “The Special Kinesiology of Educational Gymnastics” (Boston, Lee and Shepard). His small “Handbook of School Gymnastics of the Swedish System” (Boston, Lee and Shepard) was ready in 1892. Among his more important papers were “How Gymnastics Are Taught in Sweden” (The Academy, Boston, V: 485-493, December, 1890), a series on “The Scientific Aspects of Swedish Gymnastics” (The Doctor, New York, October, 1890, to August, 1892, Volumes IV-VI), “The Necessity of Physical Education and the Means of Introducing it into American Schools” (Popular Educator, Boston, IX: 122 and 123, December, 1891), “Modifications of the Swedish System of Gymnastics to Meet American Conditions” (Physical Education, Springfield, Mass., I: 169-174, November, 1892), and “Swedish Gymnastics vs. German” (Posse Gymnasium Journal, Boston, July, 1893). Four of these are included in his “Columbian Collection of Essays on Swedish Gymnastics” (Boston, 1893). The first number of the Posse Gymnasium Journal (monthly) was issued in December of 1892, and for four years thereafter nearly every number contained at least one contribution from his pen. Baron Posse’s death occurred on December 18, 1895, but as late as 1905 the Journal was still publishing material selected or prepared from his literary work.

The Boston “Conference in the Interest of Physical Training,” held in November of 1889, is a landmark that grows in significance as the years give perspective. Leading educators attended its sessions, and the published report of papers and discussions reached a larger audience. German and Swedish gymnastics, the systems employed at Amherst College and Harvard University, the claims of military drill, physical training for purposes of emotional expression, and for mental and moral quickening—these were all set forth by able champions. But the first place on the program, after the opening remarks by Commissioner Harris, was assigned to a judge and not an advocate, to a trained biologist and thorough scholar, able to speak with authority regarding the effects of exercise upon body and mind, familiar with the history of this phase of education at home and abroad, and made acquainted with the various systems by travel and personal observation. It was peculiarly fitting that Dr. Edward Mussey Hartwell should be chosen to discuss “The Nature of Physical Training, and the Best Means of Securing Its Ends,” on that occasion, and his appointment as director of physical training in the Boston schools a year later came as a further testimonial to proved ability. There was need in those years of just such a keen and fearless critic, impatient of assumption and half-knowledge, conscious of adequate mastery of his theme, and gifted with a pungent vigor of expression that compelled attention.

Dr. Hartwell came from a long line of New England ancestry. Shattuck Hartwell, his father, a graduate of Harvard College and Law School, was just closing the fourth year of service as tutor in Latin at Harvard when the boy was born (May 29, 1850, at Exeter, New Hampshire). The mother was a daughter of Dr. Reuben Dimond Mussey, who after holding for almost a quarter-century a professorship in the medical department of Dartmouth College, his alma mater, had moved to Cincinnati twelve years before to become professor of surgery in the Medical College of Ohio. In the fall of 1850 Shattuck Hartwell took up his residence in the same city, but after less than seven years in the practice of law returned to Littleton, Mass., his birthplace, thirty miles northwest of Boston. This was henceforward the family home. With the exception of a few years, he was employed in the Boston Custom House from the fall of 1865 until his death in 1899.

Edward, the oldest of eight children, graduated from the Public Latin School in Boston at the age of nineteen. It is worth noting that as one of Captain Hobart Moore’s orderly sergeants in the school battalion he gained experimental knowledge of military drill at this period. Then followed four years at Amherst College (A.B. 1873, A.M. 1876, LL.D. 1898), and the fact that he was chosen captain of his class in the gymnasium in the junior year, rowed on class and other crews, and was at one time commodore of the navy, suggests not only physical fitness and gifts of leadership, but also the influence of Dr. Edward Hitchcock and the department of hygiene and physical education. In 1871 he won the gold medal for excellence in human physiology. College days were succeeded by four years of teaching, first as vice-principal of the high school in Orange, New Jersey (1873-1874), and then as “usher” in the Public Latin School in Boston (1874-1877), where he had once been a student. At the latter Hobart Moore was still instructor in military drill, and in obedience to the wish of the head master Hartwell introduced the Amherst plan of class exercises in light gymnastics among the smaller boys.

Greatly interested in natural science, he had already attended the summer school at Penikese Island, and this inclination now led him to abandon teaching for a time. An uncle, Dr. William Heberden Mussey, was professor of surgery in the Miami Medical College in Cincinnati, and prominent in scientific and educational circles in the city. Thither he came, therefore, to take up the study of medicine (1877-1878), but interrupted the course for three years in biology at Johns Hopkins University (1878-1881), leading to the degree of Ph.D., and did not receive his M.D. in Cincinnati until 1882. In Baltimore, where he was fellow in biology for two years in succession (1879-1881), he made animal physiology, under Professor H. Newell Martin, his principal study, and the subordinate ones animal histology and morphology under Dr. William K. Brooks. Membership in and papers before the Scientific Association, the History and Political Science Association, and the Metaphysical Club attest the breadth of his view at this time, and reveal a fondness for historical as well as biological research.

After a summer’s work in Baltimore in 1881, and before entering upon the second and final year in Cincinnati, Dr. Hartwell went home to Littleton for a brief vacation, and in Cambridge looked over the new Hemenway gymnasium and made the acquaintance of Dr. Sargent. Interested in what he saw and heard, he spoke of the visit to Herbert B. Adams, another Amherst man, then associate in history at Johns Hopkins University. The students at the university were agitating the subject of a gymnasium. It was therefore natural that his advice should be sought, and the next fall (1882) he was offered the position of instructor in physical culture. The death of Dr. Mussey in Cincinnati, on the first of August, had left him without definite plans for the future, and a leaning toward hygiene moved him to accept the call to Baltimore. In June of 1883 the trustees authorized the construction of a $10,000 gymnasium, which was ready for use before the Christmas holidays. It was supplied with the Sargent developing appliances, and he at once introduced the Sargent plan of physical examinations and prescribed individual work, in place of class exercises, and also gave lectures to undergraduates on health topics. After two years of service he became Associate in Physical Training and Director of the Gymnasium, and remained at Johns Hopkins in that capacity until the end of 1890.

An address which Dr. Hartwell delivered to the students of the university and others on the occasion of the formal opening of the new gymnasium, December 7, 1883, contained a review of the history of physical training in ancient and modern Europe and in America. Soon afterwards Commissioner John Eaton, of the United States Bureau of Education, asked him to prepare a special report for that department. The result was a visit to college and other gymnasia from Maine to Tennessee, in the summer of 1884, and the manuscript for a volume of 150 pages on “Physical Training in American Colleges and Universities,” with illustrations and plans, which was handed in on the fourth of March following. Immediately upon completing it he sailed for Europe, to look up matters relating to hygiene as well as gymnastics. After a brief visit to England he spent most of the time in Frankfort and Berlin, with a side trip to Dresden for the Sixth General Gymnastic Festival of the German Turnerschaft, and some attendance upon clinics in Vienna. A 25-page appendix on “Physical Training in Germany” was now added to the former report, and 2 pages on the North American Turnerbund, whose existence he had discovered while abroad, and the whole was issued as No. 5—1885 of Circulars of Information of the Bureau of Education (Washington, 1886).

It seems to have been this visit of Dr. Hartwell’s to Germany which led, directly or indirectly, to the presence of representative German-Americans at the second annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education, in Brooklyn November 26, 1886, where for the first time the work of the North American Turnerbund was brought prominently before native American teachers, by descriptive and historical papers and by illustrative classes of men and children. Dr. Hartwell himself was elected treasurer of the Association at this meeting, and read a paper on “The Physiology of Exercise,” not printed in the Proceedings but later amplified and rewritten and published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal for March 31 and April 7, 1887 (Vol. 116, pp. 297-302 and 321-324). As far back as September of 1884 Commissioner Eaton had introduced him to Hartvig Nissen, at the latter’s Health Institute in Washington. Early in 1887 Mr. Nissen was invited to give a course of lessons in “Swedish free movements” and German apparatus exercises to Johns Hopkins students, and this instruction was continued in 1887-1888, from November to the middle of April. From the following May until the end of August, 1889, Dr. Hartwell was in Europe on leave of absence, interested especially in the hygienic and medical application of exercise and with the thought of developing a practice in this specialty upon his return. The winter was spent in Stockholm, with almost daily visits to the Zander Institute and the Royal Central Institute of Gymnastics. He went also to St. Petersburg, revisited Vienna, and received six weeks of instruction in Bonn. December 20, 1889, he read a paper on “Mechano-Therapy in Sweden and Germany” before the Clinical Society of Maryland, and repeated it in March before the Johns Hopkins Hospital Medical Society. In this connection attention may be called to the 45 pages on General Exercise which he prepared for Vol. I of Dr. H. A. Hare’s “System of Practical Therapeutics” (Philadelphia, 1891), and to his translation, from the Swedish, of Dr. Emil Kleen’s “Handbook of Massage” (Philadelphia, 1892).

Meanwhile he had been consulted in the preparation of plans for the Boston Conference of 1889, and an examination of the printed proceedings will show how conspicuous a part he played at the various sessions. The summer of 1890 was devoted to a third visit to Europe, this time to gather material relating to school gymnastics and playgrounds. The trip took him to England, France, Switzerland, parts of Austria and Germany, and again to Stockholm. June 24 the Boston School Committee had voted to introduce the Ling or Swedish system of educational gymnastics into all the public schools, and on November 25 they elected him director of physical training. Still hoping to become eventually the head of an institution for mechano-therapy, he consented to inaugurate the work of the new department, and his resignation was therefore presented to the Johns Hopkins trustees, to take effect December 31.

A part of the story of the next seven years is contained in his series of five “Reports of the Director of Physical Training” to the School Committee of Boston, dated December 31, 1891 (75 pages. School Document No. 22—1891), June, 1894 (151 pages. School Document No. 8—1894), 1895 (82 pages. In School Document No. 4—1895), March 15, 1896 (pages 159-192 in School Document No. 4—1896), and March 15, 1897 (pages 135-143 of School Document No. 5—1897). On September 1, 1897, he resigned his position in the Boston schools to become secretary of the newly created Department of Municipal Statistics in that city. One must also examine the contents of the published Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education, from the sixth meeting (1891) onward, and of their successor, the American Physical Education Review, to appreciate fully the yeoman’s service he rendered to physical training in the country at large, during these years and also after his direct connection with the work had ceased. In 1891-1892 he was president of the Association, and again from 1895 to 1899, and he was author of the plan of reorganization on the basis of local and district societies which was adopted in 1895. Chapter XII (Physical Training) in the Report of the Commissioner of Education for 1897-1898 (Washington, 1899), and Chapter XVII (On Physical Training) in that for 1903 (Washington, 1905), give final expression to the results of his years of study and observation. His long series of reports and papers which began in 1885 constitute the most scholarly contribution hitherto made to the literature of physical training in English, and no other man in America has done so much to win for physical training a position of dignity and recognized worth. Dr. Hartwell died in Boston February 19, 1922.

Other pioneers of Swedish school gymnastics who deserve further mention, or should be included here, are Hartvig Nissen, Claës J. Enebuske, Jakob Bolin, Louis Collin, and William Skarstrom. Nissen, born in Kongshavn, near Christiania, July 13, 1855, was educated in the large private higher school (Latin- og Realskole) opened in the Norwegian capital by his father, Ole Hartvig Nissen, studied gymnastics and massage with private teachers here and later in Dresden (1878-1879, in the Allgemeiner Turnverein) and Stockholm (summer of 1890), for three years taught gymnastics in towns near Christiania, and in March of 1883 established a “Health Institute” in Washington, D.C., as we have seen. 1891-1897 he worked with Dr. Hartwell in the Boston public schools as assistant director of physical training, and 1897-1900 himself served as director. In 1891 he became instructor in Swedish gymnastics and massage in the Harvard University Summer School, and five years later in the Sargent Normal School of Physical Education. 1900-1912 he was director of physical training in the Brookline public schools, and then resigned to remove to Portland, Oregon. But he soon returned to Boston, and in May of 1915 acquired a controlling interest in the Posse Normal School of Gymnastics, of which he became president.⁠[283]

Enebuske was born in Ystad, southern Sweden, May 6, 1855, graduated as a student of pharmacy in Stockholm (1877), and took his doctor’s degree (Ph.D.) at the University of Lund in 1886. After a year of special work in school and medical gymnastics, under Colonel Norlander, fencing-master and teacher of gymnastics at the university, he came to New York City in 1887. Dr. William G. Anderson, then in charge of physical training in Adelphi Academy, Brooklyn, had begun to train teachers there (February 1, 1886), and at Chautauqua, New York (summer school, in 1886), and he secured Enebuske’s services at the latter in the summers of 1889 and 1890, and in his normal school in Brooklyn during the intervening year. We have said that Enebuske succeeded Posse at the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics early in 1890. Here his chief work was done, in the eight years that followed, and meanwhile (1896) he graduated from the medical department of Harvard University. In 1898 he left the Normal School, and in 1902 removed to Paris, receiving the degree Docteur en Médecine from the Faculté de Médecine de Paris four years later. He was a scholarly gentleman and a thorough teacher.⁠[284]

Bolin, born in Stockholm November 5, 1863, and educated in the higher schools of Visby and Stockholm and at the Stockholm University, spent two years in the United States (1885-1887) and then returned to Sweden for a year to study medical gymnastics in Liedbeck’s Institute (Stockholm). From 1888 until he accepted the professorship of physical education in the University of Utah (Salt Lake City) in 1910 he practised medical gymnastics and massage in New York City, but in the meantime followed Enebuske as teacher of Swedish gymnastics at the Anderson Normal School of Physical Education (transferred from Brooklyn to New Haven, Conn., in 1892 and since 1901 known as the New Haven Normal School of Gymnastics), until 1907, and at Chautauqua Summer School of Physical Education 1891-1909. He died in Salt Lake City May 15, 1914.⁠[285]

Carl Oscar Louis Collin, born February 1, 1866, at Sölvesborg, a seaport near Kristianstad in southern Sweden, graduated from the higher classical school in Kristianstad in 1884 and as a student there was for four years class leader under Major Carl Silow, who afterwards became second teacher in the section of school gymnastics at the Stockholm Central Institute of Gymnastics. From September of 1884 until October of 1888 Collin was a student in the University of Lund, taking courses in gymnastics under Colonel Carl Norlander at that time, and in November of 1888 joined Enebuske in New York City. He taught gymnastics at Chautauqua with the latter in the summers of 1889 and 1890, and went with him to Boston in the fall of 1890 to become instructor in practical gymnastics and afterwards in anatomy also at the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics. From April till August of 1892 he studied under Major Silow in Stockholm, in 1898 graduated from the medical department of Harvard University, spent six weeks of the summer in the medical gymnastic clinic of Dr. Anders Wide in Lysekil, Sweden, succeeded Enebuske that fall as chief instructor in the theory and practice of gymnastics at the Normal School, and continued in that position for three years after it became the department of hygiene and physical education of Wellesley College, in September of 1909. He taught in the Battle Creek Normal School in 1912-1913, and in the latter year became an instructor in the Chicago Normal School of Physical Education.

William Skarstrom was born in Stockholm June 15, 1869, and educated in the Nya Elementarskola (higher school for boys), whose pupils received their physical education in the halls of the Central Institute of Gymnastics. For two years following the fall of 1891 he was in New York City, a member of the Twenty-third Street Young Men’s Christian Association and volunteer instructor of classes in its gymnasium, and during one winter taking a correspondence course with the Springfield Training School. He entered the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics as a student in the fall of 1893 and completed the course there in 1895, acting as Bolin’s substitute at Chautauqua in the summer of 1894, and in 1901 received the degree of doctor of medicine from Harvard University. From the fall of 1899 through the spring of 1903 he gave instruction in gymnastics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and also at the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics. 1903-1912 he was instructor in the Columbia University gymnasium, giving courses in Teachers College also and in the Summer School. In 1912 he was appointed associate professor and later (1918) professor in the department of hygiene and physical education at Wellesley College. He has written “Gymnastic Kinesiology: A Manual of the Mechanism of Gymnastic Movements” (Springfield, Mass., The F. A. Bassette Co., 1909), and “Gymnastic Teaching” (Springfield, Mass., the American Physical Education Association, 1914).

Alice Tripp Hall, a graduate of Wellesley College (1881) and the Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia (1886), visited the Central Institute of Gymnastics in Stockholm in the spring of 1889, and that fall when she took up her duties as professor of physiology, hygiene, and physical training in the Woman’s College of Baltimore (now Goucher College) classes in the new gymnasium, Bennett Hall, were put in charge of a graduate of the Central Institute, Mathilda Kristina Wallin (class of ’85). Miss Wallin was followed two years later by Gulli Öberg (’85) and Maria Palmquist (’91), under whom a demonstration of Swedish gymnastics was given April 7, 1892, before visitors on their way to the seventh annual convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education, in Philadelphia. Thereafter the instructors employed in the gymnasium were regularly graduates of the Stockholm Central Institute, or of the Physical Training College at Dartford Heath, England, which was directed by Madame Bergman Österberg, herself a graduate of the Central Institute in 1881.

In a similar manner Dr. Kate Campbell Hurd, also a graduate of the Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia, and under appointment as the first medical director at the Bryn Mawr School for Girls, in Baltimore, spent the winter of 1889-1890 at the Central Institute in Stockholm and the spring with Madame Bergman Österberg in London (Her Physical Training College was removed to Dartford Heath, Kent, in 1895), and engaged as her first assistant in the gymnasium Fanny Schnelle (Stockholm Central Institute, class of 1891), whom she had met in Sweden. After Miss Schnelle came one of Madame Bergman Österberg’s graduates, to be succeeded in turn by young women trained at the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics, Miss Senda Berenson, a graduate of the latter school, introduced the Swedish system at Smith College, in Northampton, Mass., where she was director of physical training in the years 1892-1911.

In this connection attention may be called again to Mrs. Hemenway’s gift which made possible the publication of a portion of Hjalmar Ling’s collection of pen-drawings illustrating positions and movements used in gymnastics (see p. 161). One half of the edition was presented to the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics. Director Törngren of the Stockholm Central Institute also accepted her invitation to come to Boston as her guest, reached that city May 14, 1893, and spent some time at the Normal School, in June watched the classes in gymnastics at many of the Boston schools, and the next month read a paper on “The Royal Central Institute of Gymnastics in Stockholm” at the eighth annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education, in Chicago (see Proceedings VIII: 50-52). The clearest and most intelligent exposition of the system under discussion which has yet been written by an American is “A Review of Swedish Gymnastics,” by Theodore Hough, first prepared as a lecture in 1899 while its author was assistant professor of biology in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and instructor in physiology and personal hygiene at the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics. It was published in pamphlet form (Boston, George H. Ellis, 1891, forty pages), and later reprinted in the Report of the United States Commissioner of Education for 1898-1899 (Vol. I, pp. 1209-1226, Washington, 1900).