Disability History Month: Accessibility and Archives: “Well endured is half cured”
In this post for the 2024 Disability History Month, Philip Milnes-Smith introduces the life of the showman ‘Lord’ George Sanger (1825-1911). It contains language of the period which may now cause offence.
In this blog series we have seen that one of the employment options available to previous generations of disabled people was performing their disability for the astonishment and entertainment of others. For example, we saw Sarah Biffin start her artistic career with demonstrating fine motor skills, and William Ritchie Watson aspiring to more but still finding himself up on stage.
By Sanger’s account, his father had been on-board Victory at Trafalgar where the loss of “several fingers” saw him invalided from the service. His return “as a maimed, poor sailor was anything but welcome” to his family and he invested in a small peep-show, offering scenes of (amongst other marvels) the naval battle where he had been wounded. Other shows of this period could offer giants like Fred Randal and Sam Taylor, or “Fat Tom” (“the heaviest man on earth”), “Skinny Jack” (“the living skeleton”) and Bob (“the armless man, who painted pictures with his feet”). Sanger, however, admits that his father’s “living curiosities”, at this stage in his career, were created by show-business rather than nature.
Another of his father’s additions was a “very primitive kind of roundabout”. It was an accident involving this machine that disabled George himself as a teenager:
Custom, no doubt, made me careless. Anyhow, on this particular occasion as I went to do something at the centre of the machine, which worked on a pivot in a kind of open trunk, my foot slipped, my right leg was jammed between the pivot and the spars, and in a moment a bolt literally tore the flesh of the calf away from the limb… Father heard the cry and quickly saw what had happened. He at once wound some strips of canvas about my leg…
[W]hen we did find a surgeon he gave me something to drink, looking at the wound, and immediately told my father that the limb must come off. Father protested against this idea, and another surgeon was called in for consultation. He agreed with his colleague that the leg must come off, otherwise I should die, because the injury was so great, the flesh so torn, that it was bound to mortify… I remember hearing the discussion as if in a dream. I was in no pain, only very faint, with a predominant feeling of curiosity, which I can vividly recall, as to how I should look with a wooden leg, and what my friends would think of me.
The trajectory of the story did not go as you might have expected. He did not “become a cripple with a crutch and a timber toe” because his father refused to consent to the removal of the limb. Instead, back at the van, his father sewed the limb back up “in good sailor fashion”, strapped it up with “diachylon plaster” and put him to bed. Six weeks later he began to walk again. The scars and stitches were both a lifelong concealed disfigurement and lasting evidence to professional medical men of “a really marvellous bit of surgery”.
An earlier childhood incident offers another instance of his father’s amateur medical skill. In 1833, George’s sister was one of many to contract smallpox which had then “burst forth into a tremendous pestilence that stalked the length and breadth of the land.” At a moment when “nobody thrived except the undertakers”, she was one of the lucky ones. She “had it very badly, and though she recovered, was pitted in a dreadful way.” Although there was then no vaccination, Sanger notes that his father was aware of inoculation and made a trial of it:
When the pustules on my sister were fully developed, he got us other children together and operated on us. His instrument was a long darning needle. This he passed right through the upper part of the muscle of each one's right arm. Then into the tiny wound on each side he rubbed a little of the serum taken from the pustules of the sufferer. I cannot think of the operation even now without a shudder, but the results were all that could be wrished.”
The success of the procedure was a marketing opportunity – hundreds came to him to have the inoculation (and a medicine of his father’s compounding). In an earlier blog we noted the frequency of the consequent facial disfigurement in survivors of this period. Sanger, similarly, says it affected “two out of every six persons” when he was a young man. He also notes his advocacy of vaccination to his own troupe in later years.
He also reports a psychological intervention that prevented the “madness or suicide” of an Ashbourne farmer:
[H]e told me he had had a terrible dream in which he thought he was being taken to the scaffold, and as he woke up struggling he thought he heard a voice say, “The gallows will be your end!''
He had, he said, dreamt the same dream three times running and could not rest for thinking of it. The poor fellow certainly looked very worn and haggard, and I resolved to see if I could ease his mind by a little pious deception.
The man sought out Sanger five years later, now married with children (as had been predicted in the showman’s interpretation of the dream), and said that “he had never worried any more about it after I had assured him it was a false vision.” Although Sanger himself enjoyed several years of retirement, he died on 28th November 1911, from head injuries attributed to an axe-murder (at the hands of his valet Herbert Cooper), but which may have been accidental.
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