Hippocrates — known as the father of medicine — would hoist patients on a ladder with ropes and pulleys in an effort to stretch them and relieve their ailments. A book published in the 1970s by US-based Dr Robert Martin Jr. increased the spread of inversion through a programme that used special tables. By the 1980s, multiple companies were creating inversion tables to cater to the craze for clinical and at-home therapy.