Georgia Department of Labor
Suite 642 148 Andrew Young International Boulevard N.E.
Atlanta, Georgia 30303-1751 (404)656-3032

December 6, 2002............................................................................................................FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
VETERAN WARM SPRINGS THERAPIST ADDRESSES YOUNG RECRUITS

WARM SPRINGS Physical therapy has changed a lot since Kathryn Phillips was helping polio patients at the Warm Springs Foundation in the 1950s.

Trained by the U.S. Army because she, like many other young women in the 1940s, wanted to help with the war effort, Phillips left Chicago's orthopedic clinics after the war to come to Georgia as one of the early Warm Springs physical therapists. What she encountered, however, wasn't anything like World War II. "We weren't prepared for patients in the civilized world," she recalled recently while addressing a group of visiting North Georgia College and State University physical therapy majors at the Georgia Department of Labor's Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation.

Just one of many revelations the 82-year-old therapist made during her informal meeting with the young PTs Nov. 20, Phillips was like a living occupational icon for the class of 25 students who also sat through such subjects as "Sexual Concerns for Spinal Cord Injury Patients" during a three-day workshop in Warm Springs.

Introduced as "a giant" in the field by Rick McKibbon, a St. Francis Hospital of Columbus PT and former North Georgia graduate who arranged for her visit, Phillips now lives in Pine Mountain with another

Laura Pancake, a senior physical therapy major at North Georgia College, presents a Certificate of Appreciation to former Warm Springs therapist Kathryn Phillips on behalf of her classmates during

former Warm Springs PT, Betty Brown, whose tenure dates even farther back into the FDR Era of the 1940s.

a recent three-day workshop for aspiring PTs at the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation. The 82-year-old Phillips, one of the

first American physical therapists to receive

"People think all we did here was take care of polio patients, but as polio training as the result of World War II, was a special was eliminated from this country with the vaccine, we started to see other guest speaker. Phillips now makes her home in things like spinal cord injuries and stroke victims, and we weren't really Pine Mountain.

prepared to take care of those kind of things. We didn't really offer patients enough," she said.

What evolved from those early encounters with "other" disabilities, however, was the start of physical therapy, as we know it today. "We had to learn to treat all those other things and we treated them any way we could get results," she added. "Nowadays, you practice based on research, but there was no research in the beginning. Physical therapy actually started in this country with Army Reconstructive Aides."
Phillips credited therapeutic exercise, as the basis for what eventually became the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA), an organization that "elevated PTs as medical professionals" who could obtain advanced degrees.
"Before the APTA, physical medicine doctors had a registry of all therapists and controlled them, and we didn't particularly like that. It led to big fights. Luckily, here in Warm Springs, our medical director, Dr. Robert L. Bennett, was smart enough to realize that physical therapists should know enough about what a patient should and shouldn't do to make their own diagnosis and determine treatment. It was physical therapy as needed and you figured it out," Phillips added.
Another early battleground for physical therapy was the result of men being excluded from the APTA. Phillips indicated the organization was limited to women when it was started in the 1940s. It wasn't until the early 1960s that male physical therapists achieved leadership positions in the APTA, but now the organization has leveled out and includes "a lot of mutual respect between the sexes."
Phillips was a fulltime therapist at the Warm Springs facility from 1951 through 1979 and part-time for most of the 1980s.

FOR MEDIA INFORMATION, CONTACT MARTIN HARMON, RWSIR PUBLIC RELATIONS, 706/6555668 OR fmharmon@dol.state.ga.us.
FY03-279

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