people may view the origin of photography differently. Similarly, French and American people may argue about the origins of cinematography. These arguments over origins appear frequently because discoveries and developments often happened in parallel in different countries, but before recent advances in travel and communications, the coincidence of these events was not known.

Egyptian stelae and Roman mosaics have shown that technology has been used in rehabilitation since antiquity, especially by people who had undergone amputations and people who had had polio. Paintings by Brueghel the Elder show the use of a number of simple technologies in the 16th century by people with disabling conditions.

Wars and conflicts have been primary stimuli for technological innovations in the rehabilitation of people with disabling injuries. The armor makers of the medieval era were skilled at making functionally effective artificial hands and leg prostheses of metal and were probably early forerunners of today's prosthetists and orthotists. In Goethe's play The Iron Hand, the noble German knight Götz von Berlichingen remarks that his iron hand had served him better in the fight than ever did the original of flesh.

The Napoleonic wars fostered some technical innovations in rehabilitation, and the enormous number of amputations resulting from the U.S. Civil War more or less created the prosthetics industry in the United States. It was at that time that President Abraham Lincoln established the Veterans Administration (VA; now the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs). At the same time, the federal government recognized the value of science to the nation, and in 1863, the National Academy of Sciences was established to be an independent, nonprofit adviser to the federal government. However, it was World War I that set the stage for the modern rehabilitation movement. Of particular note were the advances made in Germany during and following that war.

Ferdinand Sauerbruch was one of the first surgeons to recommend multidisciplinary scientific and engineering endeavors in rehabilitation. In Zurich, in 1915, he worked together with Aurel Stodola, a professor of mechanics at the Polytechnical Institute of Zurich, to produce a hand prosthesis that was controlled and powered through muscle cineplasty. Sauerbruch relied heavily on muscle physiologists and anatomists to assist him with decisions about how to successfully bring muscle forces outside the body using the surgical procedure of tunnel cineplasty, a technique that he advanced at an army hospital in Germany. Sauerbruch attributed his successful implementation of this technique to the