Stolen Touch, Stolen Steam: From Ling to Milady, How Our Healing Was Laundered Through Whiteness
My Classroom Realization
In esthetics class, they handed me an assignment on Per Henrik Ling. We were told to call him the “father of Swedish gymnastics,” as if his name was sacred, as if all of modern massage and spa culture began with him. But I have never been the kind of woman to swallow whatever is fed to me without questioning the taste. So, I dug. I kept digging. And the more I pieced together, the more it became clear: everything I was paying over ten thousand dollars to learn, through the sanitized lens of whiteness, was stolen. The strokes. The steam. The herbal compresses. The “scientific” facials. All of it. What they branded as European innovation was lifted from my ancestors, laundered through France, given Latin names, and sold back to me as gospel.
Everything I was paying over ten thousand dollars to learn, through the sanitized lens of whiteness, was stolen.
Stolen Bodies, Stolen Science
When I look at these textbooks, Milady, with its neat charts and sterile diagrams, I see ghosts. Because the truth is, European science didn’t grow in clean white labs. It grew on our bodies.
In Saint-Domingue, my ancestors weren’t just enslaved for sugar; their bodies were laboratories. They healed each other with herbs, poultices, and bone-setting because they had to. And while they were practicing medicine without the name “doctor,” the colonials were watching, taking notes, and carrying that knowledge back to Europe.
At the same time, in Paris and Lyon, Black and Indigenous bodies were shipped across the ocean not just as labor but as specimens. They were dissected in medical schools, measured, broken down into muscle diagrams and bone charts. Those same anatomical sketches that Ling and his European peers leaned on were drawn from flesh that was never given consent.
European science didn’t grow in clean white labs. It grew on our bodies.
That is why I refuse to call Ling a “father.” His so-called Swedish gymnastics and the massage strokes codified by Mezger were already written on our skin. The “science” they branded as European was made possible because our bodies were both the source of the knowledge and the tools of their experiments.
And here lies the double standard:
They will bow at the feet of “ancient Asian wisdom” and credit acupuncture or Ayurveda because it feels safe and exotic to them.
But they will not admit that Haitian women steaming over buckets of fèy zoranj, or African midwives resetting bones with bare hands, were scientists too.
To give us credit would mean admitting that the very people they enslaved and dissected were their teachers.
Our bodies were stolen. Our medicine was stolen. And then the textbooks turned around and told us to call it Swedish, Swiss, French; anything but Black, anything but ours.
From Ling to Milady: How the Theft Was Packaged and Sold Back
When I trace the path from Ling to Milady, the story is painfully clear: what began with stolen bodies and stolen practices in Haiti and Africa was laundered into “science” in Europe, then mass-produced and sold back to us as education.
Ling passed through France at the very moment when the empire was digesting the Haitian Revolution. Colonial doctors, fleeing planters, and so-called scientists were busy rewriting our healing into French medical language: no Vodou, no fèy, no ancestors, just “hydrotherapy,” “hygiene,” “vapor baths.” By the time Ling returned to Sweden, that knowledge had already been sanitized, stripped of its Black fingerprints, and he had a neat package to build his “Swedish gymnastics.”
Then came Johann Mezger, a Dutch physician who codified massage strokes into French terms: effleurage, petrissage, tapotement. Do you see the pattern? Ling gets called the father. Mezger gets called the systematizer. But the Haitian midwife who reset bones with poultices, the African elder who used steam and herbs to restore wombs; she doesn’t get a name in any textbook.
Fast forward to the 19th and 20th century spa industry: Switzerland, Germany, and France built billion-dollar thermal towns where steam, mud, and touch were sold to the elite. They pretended these were born in clean Alpine springs instead of slave quarters and maroon camps.
Ling gets called the father. Mezger gets called the systematizer. But the Haitian midwife who reset bones with poultices, the African elder who used steam and herbs to restore wombs, she doesn’t get a name in any textbook.
And now, in my classroom, I am forced to study Milady, the modern cosmetology bible. Every page is European strokes, European products, European definitions of skin. No mention of Haiti, no mention of Africa, no mention of the elders whose science they stole. Instead, I am paying over $10,000 to be taught that the only valid knowledge is the one whiteness laundered and approved.
From Ling to Milady, the chain is unbroken: take it from us, strip it of Blackness, rename it in French, resell it to us with interest.
The Call to Write Our Own Record
This is why I refuse to let them tell me Ling was the father. Why I refuse to let Milady be the final word on esthetics. Because I see the chain of theft too clearly: from the stolen bodies of Haiti and Africa, to France laundering our healing into “hydrotherapy,” to Sweden and Switzerland repackaging it as European science, to Milady selling it back to me at ten thousand dollars a semester.
But here’s the other truth: they keep stealing because we keep leaving the record blank. We are masters of storytelling, but we treat writing as optional. We debate Vodou on social media, mocking it, weaponizing it against each other, exposing the ugly sides for clicks. Meanwhile, the beautiful truths: how our elders reset bones without a white lab, how they healed wombs with fèy and steam, how they pulled pain from the body with poultices and prayer, those truths remain undocumented, unarchived, invisible.
They keep stealing because we keep leaving the record blank.
The Asians are credited because their practices were written down, translated, and preserved in the archive. We are erased because ours lived in hands, in memory, in ceremony, and because we keep refusing to honor those as worthy of the written page. That is how whiteness wins: not just by stealing, but by counting on our silence.
If we do not write our own record, someone else will always write it for us. And they will always erase us in the process.
So here is my vow: I will write. I will record. I will name the stolen and trace it back to the hands it came from. I will refuse to let whiteness launder my culture into “science” without a fight. And I call on every one of us, healers, estheticians, mothers, storytellers, to do the same. Because if we do not write our own record, someone else will always write it for us. And they will always erase us in the process.
