Vida Muir’s clinic casebook 1943

A few weeks ago, Margaret Almao was given an old physiotherapy notebook that had once belonged to a patient’s mother.  Vida Muir’s clinic casebook contains more than 44 pages of hand-written notes on patient cases, including extensive diagnostic data long before physiotherapy was a first-contact profession.  Vida’s daughter included a letter telling some of Vida’s life story.  The letter is reproduced here.

Vida Marion Muir was born 11 Sept 1909 in Wanganui.  She attended Wanganui Girls College and had hopes of becoming a doctor.  However, her mother was a widow, and while she was able to support Vida’s older brother through his dentistry degree, was unable to help Vida through university. 

Instead she trained as a primary school teacher and taught in ghastly rural situations through the Great Depression, finally getting a position in one of the early intermediate schools (in Dunedin or Christchurch).  It was while she was teaching physical education at this school that she developed a plan to go to Otago University. 

She travelled to Wellington, met with the then Minister of Education (or the Secretary of Education) and proposed that he fund her through a physiotherapy course, after which she would take what she learned to develop a new phys ed curriculum in intermediate schools.  He agreed, and she went to Otago and studied physiotherapy. 

It was seventh heaven for her, following the medical students after they had dissected cadavers, attending anatomy lectures and effectively studying alongside students studying to be doctors.  It was as close as she could hope for. 

Then the Second World War intervened, and she was drawn in to work on members of the armed forces returning wounded from the war.  She never did return to teaching, nor to incorporating Indian club swinging (which I think she may have learned during her time in Dunedin) into the school curriculum. 

She was trained in the arts of massage and exercises, and was an intelligent, free-thinking woman, ahead of her time in many respects.  If she had been born at a different time, in different family circumstances, she would have become a doctor and made a very different contribution.  As it was, when she was 38 years old, two years after the end of the war, she married and settled into post-war married life, as women did, raised two adopted children and lived the rest of her life in a small provincial town in the North Island.  She died at the age of 85 of a heart attack, twenty-five years after a double mastectomy! 

She was a pioneering mountaineer in the 1930s, an avid skier before the days of ski tours, and a tramper up until a few years before her death.  She kept her excellent posture until her final years, and was a great advocate for life-long physical activity.  Her regard for the physiotherapy course at Otago was the very best – she always spoke very highly of her lecturers and the subjects she studied.

Many thanks to Mrs A.T. and Margaret Almao for sending us the beautiful casebook. 

By David Nicholls

The cover of Vilda Muir's clinic casebook