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THIS ISSUE:
90th
Anniversary
Swedish Institute on-line newsletter for our students, faculty and community.
Theodore A. Melander
Founder, 1916
When Captain Theodore Melander sailed into the harbor at the turn of the century,
New York was the
world’s newest modern city. The Statue of Liberty had been erected and was welcoming a million immigrants
a year from Europe. Skyscrapers were going up, and if the phrase “traffic jam” wasn’t invented here, it
could have been, even back then.
Captain Melander arrived from Sweden as a graduate of the Royal Military Academy in Sweden. He was a
licensed physiotherapist there and had worked at the Royal Central Gymnastic Institute in Stockholm
as a director and medical gymnast. He was industrious and single-minded in his ambition to bring the
Swedish system of medical gymnastics to America. He chose his new location well.
Within a very short time Captain Melander had made himself known. According to archived correspondence, in
1902 Captain Melander was treating patients referred by Dr. Robert Carlisle with “gymnastic and
calisthenic exercise…electric light and thermal applications.”
From 1903 through 1926 he worked at a number of places, sometimes simultaneously, including Bellevue
Medical College of New York University, Beekman Street Hospital, and the Neurological Institute Hospital
and Laboratory at East 67th St.
A Penchant for Teaching
He was teaching as well. Captain Melander was on the faculty of the Chautauqua School of Physical
Education, taught physiotherapy class at clinics at NYU and Bellevue from 1915 to 1926, and was director
of Swedish and Therapeutic Gymnastics at the Savage School for Physical Education for 26 years (1910 to
1936).
At the location where he had his private practice, 17 East 59th Street, he was also holding classes. In
1916 he incorporated his classes under the name of the Swedish Institute of Physiotherapy.
Captain Melander obviously felt that physiotherapy belonged in the hospital setting. He quickly
established student internships in local hospitals. At the time the course of study consisted of 1,000
hours at the school and 666 hours at the hospital. Students worked full-time for a year, with classes in
the morning and afternoons spent in the hospital.
The list of hospitals from that period includes:
Fordham Hospital
Bellevue Hospital
Beekman Street Hospital
Lenox Hill Hospital
Kings County Hospital
Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn
Penchant for a Pitcher
Captain Melander received a bit of notoriety in his time when in 1922 he helped John “Longjohn” Scott,
a New York Giant’s baseball team pitcher, recover from a shoulder injury just in time for a World Series
play-off against the Yankees. In an unidentified newspaper clipping, Mr. Scott credits Captain Melander
for making the resulting shut-out victory possible. Mr. Scott wrote in a subsequent letter, “My right
shoulder had bothered me a great deal for several months and made it impossible to use my arm. Doctors,
osteopaths and chiropractors applied all kind of treatments without any result.”
Mr. Scott was in Captain Melander’s advanced class, reserved for cases that are almost hopeless. His daily
treatments lasted 45 minutes. Captain Melander said in his interview that, “the capsule of the right
shoulder had been severely strained. However, I saw that the arm would have to be treated from the under
side, whereas the other practitioners had been applying ointments and rubs and doing their massaging from
the upper side, with no appreciable result.
“For two weeks we applied tremendous electric pressure and then when the arm began to show signs of
recovering, we put it through exercises, but without straining it. Mr. Scott merely left his arm limp
and permitted me to move it around in sweeping arcs. This treatment restored the pitching motion which
he had lost and shortly afterward I permitted him to report for active duty. The arm held up well and
after another short period of treatment, I pronounced him completely cured.”
A Dedicated Headmaster
Captain Melander remained at the helm of the Swedish Institute until about 1950, when Lillian Phillips, a 1926
alumna of the school who had assisted him for many years, took over as director.
Photos
Top: Looking East on 42nd Street, towards Fifth Avenue, about 1916. NY Public Library Picture Collection.
Source: Pictorial History of the Automobile. Viking Press, 1953.
Center: Captain Melander, circa 1926.
Bottom: Unsourced newspaper clipping from 1922.
All photos in the newsletter not otherwise specified are by Barbara Goldschmidt and are the
property of the Swedish Institute ©2006.