In the fifteenth century, Henry II. of France decreed that a treatise should be written upon the hygienic exercises of ancient Rome. Six years later, Mercurialis took up the question from a medical point of view; after which, Ambrose Paré, the most renowned surgeon of the sixteenth century, dilated on the value of the works of Oribasius, written in the time of the Emperor Julian; and he described three kinds of friction and the effects of each, and was thought so skilful, that although a devout Huguenot, he was spared at the massacre of St Bartholomew. To Peter Henrik Ling is given the credit of having instituted the ‘Swedish movement cure.’ He was even thought to have invented it; but he simply founded his system on the _Kong Fau_ manuscript, which is not only the Chinese system, but that of the Brahmins, the Egyptian priests, and the Greek and Roman physicians. M. Dally has characterised his theory and practice as nothing more than a daguerreotype copy of the _Kong Fau_ of Tao-ssè, and called it a splendid Chinese vase with its Chinese figures clothed in European colours. Estradère, moreover, proves that in the _San-tsai-tow-hoei_, published at the end of the sixteenth century, there is to be found a collection of engravings representing anatomical figures and gymnastic exercises; amongst these are figured frictions, pressures, percussions, vibrations—massage itself, in fact. These movements the Pekin missionaries affirm to have been in use from time immemorial, and were employed to dissipate the rigidity of the muscles occasioned by fatigue, spasmodic contractions, and rheumatic pains. The operators who practised this calling had no fixed dwelling, but used to walk about the streets, advertising their presence by the clanking of a chain or by some sort of musical instrument.