[Compression method throughout the ages].

Abstract

The compressive method was practiced instinctively in farthest antiquity. Its development in Western Europe over the past two centuries may be artificially divided into 3 phases. The first phase, which belongs to the prehistory of Phlebology, includes two notable facts: the start of ambulatory compression in London around 1800, and the interest that the French school immediately showed in this discovery. However, this measure was soon abandoned, since around 1880, in the Paris hospitals, ulcers of the leg were being treated by mercury plasters and rest in bed. The second phase--1900 to about 1950--is marked by the empirical development of the compressive method, mainly in chronic phlebopathies. The synergic effect of walking is definitively established; the treatment of deep-set phlebites by ambulatory compression is discovered by H. Fischer in Germany and then in France by L. Nard. Beginning in 1950, this empirical data is both spread by the new Phleboloby Societies, and submitted to rigorous scientific study. Clinicians (especially H. R. Van der Mollen), assisted by physicists, physiologists and biologists, establish the laws of "therapeutic counter-pressure" and transpose them in the textile industry. New materials facilitate the use of elastic pressure. Underestimated or little known by most physicians, ambulatory elastocompression remains for Phlobologists a fundamental therapy. At a time when sedentary living and excess use of drugs are being widely denounced, it still has a promising future.