The earliest definite information regarding massage comes from Hippocrates, who says: ‘The physician must be experienced in many things, but assuredly also in rubbing; for things that have the same name have not always the same effects, for rubbing can bind a joint that is too loose, and loosen a joint that is too rigid.’ He also used the word _anatripsis_, the process of rubbing _up_, and not _down_, although not understanding the reason of it, as it was not till five hundred years later that Galen pointed out that the arteries were not filled with air, as their name would seem to imply. Asclepiades was probably not far wrong when he founded his school at Rome on the belief that diet, bathing, exercise, and friction should keep the body without disease; and Cicero affirmed that he owed as much of his health to his anointer as he did to his physician. Plutarch tells us that Julius Cæsar had himself pinched all over daily, as a means of getting rid of a general neuralgia. Celsus, at the beginning of the Christian era, advised that rubbing should be applied to the whole body, ‘when an invalid requires his system to be replenished;’ and Pliny availed himself of a mode of treatment which was evidently much in fashion in his day, and derived so much benefit from the remedy, that he obtained for his physician, who was a Jew, the privileges of Roman citizenship. It is related of the Emperor Hadrian that one day seeing a veteran soldier rubbing himself against the marble at the public baths, he asked him why he did so. The veteran answered: ‘I have no slave to rub me.’ Whereupon, the emperor gave him two slaves and sufficient to maintain them. It is quaintly added to this story, that the next day several old men rubbed themselves against the wall in the emperor’s presence, when, perceiving their object, he shrewdly directed them to rub one another. The works of Plato abound in references to the use of friction; and numberless passages might be cited from celebrated writers describing the hygienic exercises of the gymnasium, and the manner in which children were led by degrees to execute the most difficult evolutions without fear or risk of fracture. In describing the course pursued, friction, pressure, malaxation, are all in turn noticed by different authors, and strongly recommended. The Egyptians were probably the first among civilised nations to put the system into practice, and they were copied by the Greeks and Romans. Savary, in his _Lettres sur l’Egypt_, describes part of the process: ‘After the bath and a short interval of repose, whilst the limbs retain a soft moisture, an attendant presses them gently, and when each limb has become supple and flexible, the joints are cracked without effort; il masse et semble paîtrir la chaire sans que l’on éprouve la plus legère douleur.’