Gustav Zander

Jonas Gustav Vilhelm Zander was a Swedish physician and orthopedist, born in Stockholm in 1835 and dead in 1920, and one of the originators of mechanotherapy, the treatment of patients by exercise on specially built apparatus. From the 1860s he designed machines that supplied measured, adjustable resistance to particular muscle groups, and he founded the Zander Therapeutical Institute in Stockholm to use them. His exercise machines won a gold medal at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, and the article reports that institutes on his model had been established in many countries by 1906, including at health spas. He became a lecturer in Stockholm in 1880 and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1896. Later writers have compared his variable-resistance machines with the Nautilus equipment of the 1970s, although the inventor of that equipment said he worked independently.