Healthy air
Healthy Spaces? Disability and the Countryside 1900-1930
The associationof rural spaces with health is long established. Towns and cities, where the smog, overcrowding and noise were considered the epitome of an unhealthy environment, were rejected in favour of the space, quiet and clean air of the countryside for the restoration of good health.
For disabled people, the countryside offered the prospect of outdoor spaces, the fresh air and sunshine providing health and strength for weak bodies. Many institutions for disabled peoplewere located in the countryside.Children with rickets, blindness and cognitive disabilities from the towns were taken to the countryside to become fitter and stronger. Philanthropic families like the Cadburys took children from Birmingham to their country estate. Through the rural environment, working on the land and remedial exercises in the outdoors, disabled people were exposed to the health giving aspects of the countryside.
However, the countryside was not always a healthy environment. A report from the Central Council for the Care of Cripples from 1927 noted ‘the houses of the poor in slums and country cottages revealed pitiful secrets of grown or partially grown men and women, usually quite unlettered, quite useless, quite hopeless and often incurable.’In addition, people in institutions worked hard as agricultural labourers; their schooling neglected and their bodies insufficiently nourished and cared for.
This paper will explore just how healthy rural spaces were for disabled people in the early part of the twentieth century, juxtaposing the idyllic notion of rural spaces with the reality of institutional and private life in the countryside.
Julie Anderson
University of Kent
To Grow The Children in the Open Air:A History of The Open Air School Movement in the early 20th Century
The Open Air School movement was a major public health initiative in the United Kingdom , North America and throughout Europe in the first half of the 20th century. From the first outdoor school in Charlottenberg in Germany in 1904 , until their gradual decline after the 2nd world war open air schools were founded in significant numbers. This paper looks at their philosophy , their practice , their growth and subsequent decline in the context of a more general social and public health agenda . It will examine the public health link with sanatoria and the prevention of TB but also links through Trancendentalism to Christian Socialism and children’s literature such as “ The Secret Garden”.
The Open Air school movement no longer exists within mainstream education or as public health policy yet its influence and legacy remains a powerful force in private and public attitudes to “ fresh air and health “
Mike Emanuel
Oxford Brookes University
‘A load of hot air?’ The Therapeutic Value of the Turkish Bath in Victorian Britain
The Turkish bath prior to being re-introduced during the nineteenth century had been associated with pleasure and vice during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (particularly the bagnios of Covent Garden). However the re-emergence of the Turkish bath coincided with public health and sanitary reform movements and together with a significant amount of literature being published on Turkish baths extolling their health benefits in terms of acting as a remedial agent as well as a preventative medicine, framed the Turkish bath in a more socially acceptable light compared with previous times.
David Urquhart, founder of the Turkish bath, campaigned to promote the Turkish bath as an institution that had the capacity to remedy and prevent diseases with the Turkish bath becoming an institution accredited with the ability to cure a host of ailments during the Victorian period. From the ability to cure melancholia to rheumatism and rabies, the Turkish bath became a therapeutic phenomenon gaining the support of many within the medical establishment.
This paper assesses the therapeutic value of the Turkish bath within the broader context of Victorian discourses of (public) health and wellbeing and the impact the therapeutic dimension of the bath had on the success of the Turkish bath movement. Additionally this paper considers whether the Turkish bath can be considered a ‘therapeutic landscape’ taking into consideration not only the scientific rational behind the Turkish bath but also the social and cultural aspects which would have influenced degrees of wellbeing.
Charlotte Jones
PhD Candidate
‘Nature as Tonic’: Public Health and the Invention of the Park
This paper considers the idea of nature as a restorative and recuperative property – a prescriptive device for maintaining healthy mind and body – as expressed in the park idea. While the paper will delineate the long-standing aspects of the park concept in terms of idealized nature (Romanticism and the landscape park), robust sports (the medieval deer park) and civic assembly (classical Greece), attention with be placed primarily on the nineteenth century city park movement and its articulations in the USA and in Britain.
So-called ‘Parks for the People,’ as demonstrated by Central Park, New York, Birkenhead and, of course, the London royal parks, vociferated the idea of nature as tonic, a bucolic remedy for urban industrialism and the toxicity of modernity.
Nature represented purity, rejuvenation, and a place to escape from the trappings of culture itself. That said, for all naturalistic and utopian fixings, the park remained a cultural product, a landscape defined by class, gender and political concerns as much as its green lawns and water features.
Key themes of this paper include public space, civic duty and environmental health; ideas of physical/mental rehabilitation through engagement with ‘the great outdoors’; and natural history/green therapy/biophilia.
Dr Karen Jones
Senior Lecturer in History
University of Kent, UK