Physiotherapist who pioneered the design of a walking frame for the severely disabled to use at home
IN MAY 1954 Physiotherapy, the journal of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, published a description of an apparatus to assist walking, designed by a member of the staff at Bromley General Hospital, Norman Metcalfe. One of the first appliances of its type, it was the forerunner of many of today’s aids, most visible in the ubiquitous Zimmer frame, whose name has become virtually generic for such appliances.
Aids to walking for infants and the infirm were not of course a 20th-century invention. In a painting of 1495 in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Hieronymus Bosch has the Christ-child walking with the aid of a frame, while Pieter Breughel’s The Beggars (1568) in the Louvre depicts a wide variety of doubtless home-made orthopaedic appliances supplying the deficiencies of amputated or deformed limbs exhibited in a crowd of mendicants.
But in modern times, Metcalfe’s device was one of the earliest in its field designed expressly for use in the home, thus liberating the patient from dependence on outside assistance. With it, he had restored in the first instance a degree of mobility to a patient who had suffered from the effects of poliomyelitis contracted ten years previously.
After 18 months of treatment and experimentation during which the patient, who required calipers to support her wasted limbs, had at first been able to make only painful and erratic progress on crutches and with the help of parallel bars, Metcalfe had the idea that the experience of pre and neo-motile infants might be applicable.
Noting how a young child often uses a pram to steady itself as it tries to take its first tottering steps, Metcalfe thought of such a solution for an infirm adult. But he rejected it, realising that in a case of the extreme disability with which he was confronted, wheels would undoubtedly cause more problems in terms of instability than they would solve.
He next tried to get his patient to walk with the aid of a chair. But this provided too much resistance and he eventually evolved a light tubular frame mounted on skids, which moved easily over all but the most recalcitrant of surfaces, without at the same time skidding on all but the most highly polished ones. The apparatus, constructed by M. Masters & Sons, proved an immense success, with its weight of only 4lb making it easy for a disabled person to manoeuvre. Subsequently marketed as the Metcalfe Walking Sledge, it was sold worldwide and has spawned numerous progeny.
Norman Metcalfe was born in Lambeth, the son of a horologist and an intermittent actress. He grew up in Lewisham and attended the South East London Technical Institute, where he learnt turning, fitting and machine-drawing.
During the Second World War he worked in a munitions factory, serving with the St John’s Ambulance Brigade at evenings and weekends. It was an experience that acquainted him at first hand with fearful injuries and bred in him a determination to help others to try to recover and get their lives back. In 1945 he was called up into the Army and served as a student physiotherapist in Germany.
After demoblisation in 1948 Metcalfe continued his studies in chiropody and physiotherapy, qualifying as a member of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy and joining the physiotherapy department at Bromley General Hospital.
It was there, in 1952, that he was sent the patient who had not only been afflicted with poliomylelitis ten years previously, but was recovering from surgery of the thorax to help to alleviate the ravages of pulmonary tuberculosis. The patient had not been on her feet for four years, a situation that Metcalfe’s walking sledge eventually completely overcame. Unfortunately, unable to afford to patent his invention, Metcalfe was not able to benefit financially from the apparatus that was able to restore her and many others like her to a degree of mobility.
He continued to work at Bromley General Hospital and later at Beckenham Hospital until 1965. In that year he left the NHS to go into private practice in Beckenham. He continued to work as both physiotherapist and chiropodist until well into his seventies, remaining passionate about the public issues raised by extreme disability and the provision of the means to alleviate its effects.
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April 28, 2003
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