Victor Barker was born in Ilford, Essex in 1922. He won an open scholarship to Brentwood School, where he acquired a lasting enjoyment of the English language
physical activity and mathematics. He ran his first cross-country in 1937 and joined his first weightlifting club in 1939, where his interest in Posture was first stimulated
He spent five years in the R.A.F. completing 32 operations as a pilot on a night torpedo-dropping squadron. Then he became a ferry pilot delivering aircraft from Ghana to Cairo, India, Turkey, North Africa and Italy.
After the war he studied medicine at Guy's Hospital, London. In 1953 he wrote an unpublished article on the major part that posture played in pregnancy and childbirth in particular. That article, almost unchanged, is Chapter 10 Posture in Maternity. He also studied the effect of adrenaline production in response to fear, when, as in mdern life, it is not followed by fight or flight, and concluded that exercise was vital to absorb this adrenaline production. He adopted this principle to his own life, and, at 87, he is very glad that he took his own advice.
In 1955 he emigrated to New Zealand, and entered general practice.
He became deeply involved in Sports Medicine. But his main interest was the use of exercise to treat disease, rather than the production of sports champions. He was a founder member of the world's first jogging club. The first to convince endurance athletes of the need for fluids and to maintain blood sugar levels. Knowledge gained in training a racehorse was useful in proposing the Foot Pump, as part of human circulation. By 1958 he used weightlifting exercises and running on patients with hypertension, angina, asthma type 2 diabetes and depression. But weightlifting was considered taboo, and running frowned upon, when "adequate rest" was the catchword, making patient cooperation difficult. In 1968, wanting to know the true meaning of muscle tone and the mechanism which produced it, he formulated all the ideas of Electric Man, which are in the Appendix of his book.
Failing to get articles on Osteoarthritis published, he became aware that posture was likely to play a major role in nearly every branch of medicine, so he wrote the first edition of this book in 1978, which was published in 1985 in New Zealand. The second edition was published, in English, by Japan Publications, Inc. in 1993. In 1981 he gave up general practice to devote his work entirely to Osteoarthritis, Osteoporosis and Backs.
In 1990 he was Guest Speaker on Backs at a major conference in Glasgow, Scotland on the future of medicine. By then he had developed increasing pain and mobility problems from his wartime flying and from 1990 to 1995 he underwent 14 operations on his legs, curtailing his work.
He has been living permanently in England since 1994 and has been finalising his books on Obesity, Old Age (living to 120 and enjoying it) Osteoporosis and Eyesight.
