We can trace the history of foot care back over 4,000 years: Ankmahor, whose tomb in Egypt is known as the Tomb of the Physician, has carvings of hand and feet placed at the entrance suggesting that he dealt in limbs and their problems. Perhaps this was the first instance of a “foot doctor”.

There is also a pictograph from the time of Rameses II who lived between 1279-1213 BC illustrating the tending of feet during a military campaign during the battle of Qadesh. Armies marched then and it was well known that marching can lead to a build up of hard skin.

Moving forward in time we arrive in Ancient Greece 400 years before the birth of Christ, here the great physician, Hippocrates of Kos; who we know today mainly because of the Hippocratic Oath. This is possibly the first real record of the problems of hard skin and its removal. He described corns and calluses – hard skin related complaints and recognized the need for the physical reduction of hard skin and also where possible the elimination of the cause.

Hippocrates was the inventor of skin scrapers which were much more like and probably were the original scalpels

Sometime later another Greek, Paul of Aegina, who defined a corn: "a white circular body like the head of a nail, forming in all parts of the body, but more especially on the soles of the feet and toes. He suggested it could be removed over a period of time by rubbing it down with pumice – which was the first natural foot scraper and can still play its part today.

Moving to more recent historical times we know that Napoleon employed a “foot doctor” and he was as well as an Emperor, a soldier both he and the US President at a different time recognised the problems their armies had with their feet – a repetition of a problem 2,500 years previously.

We can see feet have played a part in history not just for armies but also in love – after all was it not Mark Anthony who licked Cleopatra’s feet?