Portable Compact Physiotherapy Table

When I was in my teens, living at Dinmore, a family rented the house at the back of our property. The family was Jim and Sandra Campbell with a baby boy, Anthony. Jim was a newly commissioned helicopter pilot in Army Aviation and soon after they moved in Jim went off to Vietnam where he earned the Distinguished Flying Cross rescuing wounded Australian soldiers under enemy fire in a mine field with his Bell Souix Helicopter.

In 1968, I matriculated from High School, joined the Army and was selected to train as an officer at the Royal Military College at Duntroon in Canberra, the capital of Australia. In my second year at the college, Jim Campbell was posted there as the instructor of Aviation and I travelled back to Dinmore to help him move to Canberra in their old Holden stationwagon; crammed-packed with household effects. Because of our past association at Dinmore, I was friends with the Campbells and later would baby sit their children when they had to attend formal functions related to the Army.

The Campbell's had two children, Anthony, the eldest and Leanne. Tragically, Leanne suffered from cystic fibrosis(CF), a genetically inherited disease which primarily affects persons with a caucasian racial makeup. Among Caucasians, CF occurs in approximately 1 in 3,000-4,000 live births. For a child to be born with CF, both parents must carry the recessive CFTR gene that causes it. Approximately one in 25-30 Caucasians are carriers. In other races and ethnicities CF occurs far less commonly and really depends to a large extent on the proportion of Caucasian genes in that person's genetic makeup.

CF is a dreadful disease. It not only affects the pancreas but also gives rise to the sufferers having heavily congested lungs. Without anibiotics and frequent draining of the lungs, the sufferer will die, usually as a consequence of a lung infection. Sandra had to cope with the daily treatment that Leanne required. Part of this involved placing a tube up her nose and then forcing that into her lungs to suck out the thick mucus that would accumulate there. All of this was very upsetting to Sandra and I would go and try to assist her with this. Every time the compressor would start up to suck the mucus, poor little Leanne knew what was coming next and she would become hysterical. To reduce this, I organised through the RMC Engineering Laboratories that a silencer be made for the compressor so that it ran a lot quieter. This was my first effort in an engineering sense to help the Campbells and that dear little girl suffering from this terrible disease.

Some years later, I was posted with my wife to Melbourne. Jim was posted to the Australian Army's Command and Staff College at Fort Queenscliffe which is about 100km West, South West of Melbourne and we renewed our friendship with them. By this time I was married and living in a place called Broadmeadows on the outskirts of Melbourne where I worked at Headquarters Logistic Command. Knowing that I was something of a tinkerer and inventor, the Campbells asked me if I could make for them a multi-positional, lightweight, compact physiotherapy table that could be put into the boot of their car and erected at the homes of friends they were visiting so that they could administer physiotherapy. This physiotherapy amounted to draining Leanne's congested lungs, without causing distress, inconvenience and embarrassment to their hosts.

So, in 1976, I bought some concentric square steel tubing in order to make telescopic legs and the frame for a lightweight stretcher and commenced construction in a little garden shed at the back of my Married Quarter. Once I have finished making the table, I gave it to the Campbells and they took it away to try it out.

The Campbells had to take Leanne to The Royal Melbourne Hospital and when staff saw the table they recommened it be patented. The Campbells conveyed this message back to me and so I placed a provisional patent on the invention and then applied to appear on the ABC inventors. The table was a great success on the show and, as a consequence, Brownbuilt Australia, asked to take out a licence. In this I was helped by a lovely chap called Norman Smithells. (Norman was the manager of Brownbuilt Queensland and an ex-Spitfire pilot in the Second World War. He loved coming to our officer's mess at Cooper's Plains.) Later Roland Swartz of Immenstadt contacted me in 1982 and asked to take out a licence for manufacture. It was sheer coincidence that I was posted to Fallingbostel Germany as an exchange officer with the British Army and so I was able to travel to Immenstadt to meet with Roland and to see the prototypes they had built. Unfortunately the person who was going to market the table on behalf of Roland had a heart attack and died. The project came abruptly to an end as a consequence.