James Cyriax

James Henry Cyriax (1904 to 1985) was a British medical doctor known as the father of orthopedic medicine, whose work has influenced sports medicine and physical therapy. The son of two doctors, he qualified at the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1929 and worked for forty years at St. Thomas' Hospital in London. He developed a system of simple objective clinical examinations to diagnose soft tissue lesions around each joint, together with a matching treatment system; Cyriax's Rule distinguishes inert tissue dysfunction from contractile tissue dysfunction by comparing pain on active and passive movement. He won the Heberden prize in 1943 for an essay on elbow sprains, founded the Association of Manipulative Medicine and the Cyriax Foundation, and was a visiting professor at the University of Rochester. He was a controversial figure in his lifetime.