A Small Quiz,

what are all of the people below doing?

I should mention that children can do it as well,

now there is a clue, a weight,

I am sure you will have guessed it by now,

they are all pumping iron,

I like the clothes that are de rigueur for their training sessions,

some of these pieces of equipment will of course be familiar to gym goers, 

long before fitness clubs that are so common nowadays, Dr. Gustaf Zander (1835–1920) was helping his pupils tone their muscles in his Stockholm Mechanico-Therapeutic Institute, in his 1894 treatise on “medico-mechanical gymnastics”, Zander discusses his system as if administering a regimen of medication. “The prescription [of exercise] is methodically composed according to the needs and condition of the patient.” And the regimen worked. As Sven Lindqvist records, Zander’s success swelled at an anabolic rate. Having opened his first institute in 1865 with twenty-seven machines, by 1877 “there were fifty-three different Zander machines in five Swedish towns”. And not long after, Zander reinvented himself professionally. Once a lecturer in gymnastics at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, he soon became an international fitness entrepreneur, exporting equipment to Russia, England, Germany, and Argentina, 

Zander marketed his machines as safeguards against “a sedentary life and the seclusion of the office”, promising “increased well-being and capacity for work”. In a sense, his machines offset injuries caused by other machines: advances in mechanization created new forms of labor divorced from physical exertion. One had to work out to remain physically capable of performing further work in the office, 

the images collected above come from a catalogue distributed by “Görransson’s mekaniska verkstad”, a gymnastics equipment company, and are reproduced in a book published by Dr. Alfred Levertin on Dr. G. Zander’s Medico-Mechanische Gymastik (1892), I wonder if wearing a three piece suit, complete with pocket watch and chain will help with my daily dozen?