Health pioneers celebrate milestone

When Western Canada’s first physical therapy diploma was offered at University of Alberta in 1954, the all-female class of 18 had to meet two criteria: “a satisfactory personality and physique.”

Thinking back to it now, Elaine Roberts can laugh.

“I mean, it is very patronizing and I’m surprised by the physique part,” she says with a chuckle.

“It’s a weird way of putting it because I don’t know how you would describe what the right physique is.

“But on the other hand, part of being a physical therapist has a lot to do with your attitudes towards other people, your compassion, your ability to establish a relationship with the patient because if you don’t have that, you don’t go anywhere.”

Roberts was one of the 15 who eventually graduated as physiotherapists in 1956.

The dozen surviving members celebrated their diamond reunion this past week as part of Alumni week.

To this day, that class is recognized as pioneers in health care in the Alberta.

“They were the first cohort of women to take anatomy as a class,” says Bob Haennel, the dean of Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Alberta.

“They really did break the glass ceiling.”

At the time, Roberts says, they were too young to fully understand the enormity of what they were undertaking.

“We really were pioneers in Western Canada and we turned out to be very good therapists,” she says.

It was from an article in the Edmonton Journal on July 31, 1954, that Roberts first discovered the U of A was looking for young women to enrol in a course established to combat the debilitating effects of a polio epidemic sweeping across the province.

The 19-year-old had graduated high school two years prior and had spent one of those years working with the Department of Recreation with the City of Edmonton.

“I didn’t know what physiotherapy was so when we got the information from the school we sat down with a dictionary because I didn’t really understand all of the words,” she said.

A modified Quonset hut behind Pembina Hall on university grounds served as a classroom for 37 hours a week as lecturers Nancy Rendell and Moyna Gordon guided the women through the two years of the course.

“We had a lot of fun,” Roberts says.

“It was very congenial, amiable . ... You can’t be anything but informal.”

Today, the course is a masters degree requiring candidates to have a GPA above 3.6 and to have already studied a four-year degree that included anatomy, physiology, statistics, English, two courses in social sciences and biomechanics — and that just gets them into consideration.

An interview is the final step in the process that whittles the 800 or so prospective students each year down to 110.