In the British Medical journal of May 23rd there was an annotation entitled "Medical Research and Physical Education," dealing with the report of the Physical Education Committee of the British Medical Association. In this article it was pointed out that the systems of physical culture under review were many, varied, and often conflicting, "The many demonstrations given during the congress revealed a great diversity of outlooks and opinions on the best lines of physical training, and Mr. E. G. Savage, senior chief inspector of the Board of Education, admitted sadly that the whole subject was largely empirical." The explanation of this is simple, though overlooked. To find out what the matter is one has only to examine the principle on which these systems of physical education are based. The principle you will find is as follows: that if a person is aware of something wrong with his mechanism he should go to some expert who will tell him what to do to put it right; whereas, of course, he should act on the opposite principle and go to an expert who will tell him what he is doing to bring about his wrongness, and who will show him what not to do to enable him to stop doing the thing that is causing the wrongness. Now all systems of what is generally known as physical culture are based on the former principle, and therefore their only function is to deal with the symptoms and not with the origins of misuse; and, as symptoms differ widely, we have these diversified methods of curing them, while leaving their cause untouched. In this connexion I would draw attention to the work of F. Matthias Alexander, who some forty years ago discovered in living man what was later rediscovered by Magnus of Utrecht ­ namely, the primary control whereby the postural reflexes as a whole can be conditioned, with the resulting disappearance of the symptoms of misuse that physical culture tries, but fails, to cure. It seems to me a pity that in its report the Physical Education Committee omitted to mention Alexander's work, which I submit is the only system worthy of investigation.

Patrick J. Macdonald
London, S.W.3