Accessibility and Archives: On not presuming non-disability (Part 2)

In this, the second of two blogs to open 2024, Philip Milnes-Smith builds on last week’s blog, using indirect evidence for disability in the spa town of Cheltenham, alongside fragments of more direct evidence.

Let’s whisk ourselves back to Victorian Cheltenham, a spa town perhaps already past its Regency peak, and try to glimpse some of its disabled residents and visitors.  We should note that commentators recalled that in the 1830s and 40s, because of minimal vaccination, you might expect to see the disfiguring impact of smallpox on the face of perhaps every third or fourth person during any urban walk.  Having grown up in the town in the 1830s, William Edwin Adams informs us that his own grandfather used a stick, but his grandmother (with heterochromia) had only one leg as a result of amputation following employment in a nail factory: “constant standing on a damp floor had induced a disease that necessitated amputation”.  Importantly, she was nonetheless a working woman – a laundress (as she was described in the 1841 census).  By 1851, she was living in an almshouse:  one of the other women was a blind seamstress, Mary Roberts. 

In 1870 there were estimated to be around 60 blind residents of the town of whom 16 females and 13 males were under the care of the Home Teaching and Industrial Society for the Blind, which had opened workshops in Winchcomb Street in 1858, teaching trades for future employment but also developing literacy and music.  However, the premises were also envisaged as a place of blind community, employing blind teachers and offering a weekly meeting for the workers (who were not resident).  By the time of the 1878 Directory “baskets, doormats and various kinds of needlework manufactured by the blind”.  That year, Joseph Coles married in Cheltenham, signing the register with his mark and giving his address the Blind Asylum in Winchcomb. 

Born in the town in 1874, the future composer Gustav Holst’s childhood was described by his daughter as follows:  “His eyes were weak, but no one realized that he needed to wear spectacles. He had a weak chest, but no one bothered very much about his asthma, and sometimes when he was sent up to bed he would have to sit on the stairs three or four times before he could get enough strength to reach the top.”  By the time he was a teenager he had developed neuritis in his right hand (the reason his statue in the town shows the conducting baton in his left hand).  In 1885, a Cheltenham dentist published a study of mental derangement, arguing using local cases, that mouths overcrowded with teeth were also promoting, for example, blindness in one eye, seizures and partial paralysis, and premature death. 

But who were the intended beneficiaries of Cheltenham as a health resort?  The worried well on a health kick, or the sick and disabled in a world before the NHS?  Lucy Yeend Culler observed of her birthpace (on a visit in c.1883), and in unspoken contrast to other places, that “[p]assing through the streets one sees many invalids in easy chairs, or small low carriages drawn by men.”  Another clue perhaps is the operation in the town of a long-lived medical supply business with retail premises and a mail order option, established in 1842.  Run at first by a self-described “Surgeon Mechanist”, with the assistance of his wife for fitting lady patients, it manufactured and/or offered for sale artificial limbs, backboards and collars, leg-irons (calipers), splints and supports, apparatus for incurvation of the leg, club foot, etc and apparatus for medical electricity and galvanism and “every other kind of Surgical Instrument and Appliance for the relief of human nature”.  Incorporated as a limited company in 1914, they moved to new premises a decade later and began advertising invalid chairs for hire (as well as purchase) in 1933.

One of the town’s spas (the Cambray) was offering “Medical Galvanism and Electricity applied in their various forms” drawing on “the most recent discoveries in electro magnetism and magneto electricity”.  The entrepreneurial William Ruck (grandfather of Frank Yarnton Ruck, who featured in the previous blog) not only administered such treatments there but sold his devices both wholesale and retail for domestic use, boasting that “the patient has such command over the instrument… that he can apply [it] to… the eye, or administer shocks so severe as to be perfectly unbearable”.  Quite why anyone would want to do the latter was unclear, but a doctor of this era reports “an old gentleman, upwards of 70 years of age, who used [such an] instrument daily, for the warmth and stimulus which it afforded.”  The exciting science seems to have been considered somewhat of a panacea of last resort – for “partial paralysis, aphonia, amaurosis, and deafness”, as well as breaking up tumours, and treating “uterine inertia” during a prolonged childbirth and “amenorhoea”, as well as mental health conditions (including in lunatic asylums).  Galvanic treatments were not always effective:  Harriet Martineau briefly underwent treatment for her deafness and explicitly does not recommend it.

Back in Cheltenham, the Cambray, had been claimed to have cured Sir Francis Burdett of paralysis back in 1805.  Later its two spring-waters were deemed to help “female complaints attended by great debility, scrofula, those cases of dyspepsia in which tonics are indicated, many nervous affections, convalescence from diseases, etc”, and a later work distinguished the Saline for “all ordinary disease of the liver, stomach and bowels; in dyspeptic and bilious disorders, nephritic and dropsical affections, female complaints &c. &c. and many cases of gout and rheumatism” while the Chalybeate for “scrofula..; and… in convalescence from disease which has left great debility”.   Later again it was approved for “Dyspepsia, hepatic disorders, and chronic gout.”  It was also marketed as a Turkish Baths and Medical Galvanic Institution with the proprietor, the aforementioned Wiliam Ruck described as both Medical Galvanist and Chiropodist.  It also had a sideline as a photography studio: William had been deemed a photographic artist in 1857 and was even classed as photographer in the 1861 census.  By 1888, William’s son Frank (father of Frank Yarnton Ruck whose life was featured in the previous blog) had inherited his father’s business and upgraded the premises to offer “electro-galvanic, sulphur, salt and tar, and all descriptions of medical bath”.  In the early twentieth century it was offering vapour and alkaline baths, and then electric light baths and electric vibration.  In 1911, the hydro-electric treatment is advertised as being for “the relief and cure of gout, rheumatism, sciatica, atrophy, obesity, liver, chronic constipation and all muscular and nervous affections”.  We also learn in the 1917 book Physical Remedies for Disabled Soldiers of the treatment of 2000 military cases in the previous two years (with electric light and massage).

After the war, Frank Ruck (senior), while continuing to run his own private spa establishment, appears also to have administered treatments at the newly upgraded Medical Baths of the civic run Montpellier from 1920-1934.  Conditions treated there could have included obesity, arthritis and fibromylagia, neurasthenia and shellshock.  Shortly after Frank died in 1937 at the age of 80, the Cambray Spa was demolished.  Although it was acknowledged that a spa town had a “duty to the sick and aged”, and that treatments brought trade to the town (that outweighed the charges for treatments not covering the costs), the Medical Baths were doomed by the NHS (which would not pay for patients to have treatment there).   But there is also evidence that forward-thinking council functionaries did not want to perpetuate an association between the town and “retired Indian Army colonels in bath-chairs”.  The Medical Baths closed completely in 1955.

Guest contributions to this series remain welcome.  In the first instance, please contact diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk .

Thumbnail image of Gustav Holst : Copyright Philip Halling and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.