BERNICE (BUNNY) THOMPSON (née Alldred) - Graduate Dunedin School of Massage - class of 1943. Imagefrom Go Anywhere Do Anything. New Zealanders in the Friends Ambulance Unit in China 1945-1951

1996

Hocken BX 7726.5 Q13 No.4

Wellington: The Beechtree Press

Bunny is renowned as a pioneer and advocate for respiratory self-management and patient education. It is her work in China, however, that involved the setting up of a small physiotherapy school which is less well-known.
Bunny and her husband went to China to work for the British Religious Society of Friends’ (Quakers) Ambulance Unit (FAU) in 1945. The hospital set-up at Guang Sheng Hospital, Changde, where they were based, was to prove vastly different from New Zealand.
In 1947 the Thompsons moved to the Institute of Hospital Technology in Hankou (now Wuhan) where Bunny set up a physiotherapy training course - purportedly one of the first Western-style physiotherapy schools in China. Bunny pleaded for electrotherapy equipment to be sent from New Zealand and improvised where necessary. Her physiotherapy programme commenced in April 1947 with six students. Bunny did all of the physiotherapy teaching, and she had the intense satisfaction of passing on her physiotherapy knowledge to her Chinese students (Cameron, 1996). The Thompsons left China for the United Kingdom in 1948.