This is one of five films made of the Spa at Harrogate and its treatments in 1931.  Although the filmmaker hasn’t been identified for this particular film it was most probably made by A.R. Baines who made films of the Spa in the same year using intertitles – see the Context for Spa Treatment Harrogate Pump Room (1931). The ‘treatments’ shown  in the film range from the pleasant, one would hope, Turkish Bath, to the rather more unpleasant, one imagines, Intestinal Lavage.  There were a whole...

This is one of five films made of the Spa at Harrogate and its treatments in 1931.  Although the filmmaker hasn’t been identified for this particular film it was most probably made by A.R. Baines who made films of the Spa in the same year using intertitles – see the Context for Spa Treatment Harrogate Pump Room (1931).

The ‘treatments’ shown  in the film range from the pleasant, one would hope, Turkish Bath, to the rather more unpleasant, one imagines, Intestinal Lavage.  There were a whole host of different kinds of ‘Douche’; the one adopted at Harrogate being the Intestinal Lavage.  Despite the fact that the treatment was described as “extremely painful”, some 15,000 patients were receiving the treatment just a few years after it was introduced to Harrogate in 1905.  The course of treatment lasted three weeks, with alternate days off, and accompanied by a sulphur (sulfur) bath and a ‘submarine douche’.

The Intestinal Lavage is defined, in one online source, as (skip if squeamish!): “hydrotherapeutic procedures whereby feces, bacteria, mucus, pus, fermentation and putrefaction products, and intestinal excreta are removed from the intestine” – basically, used for constipation and mucous colitis.  It goes on to state that: “The procedure usually involves the introduction of liquids into the intestine by enema, siphonage, submerged intestinal bath, and special instruments.  An ascending intestinal douche is often used in health resorts and sanatoriums.”  It was originally established by Dr Langenhagen at the French town of Plombieres in 1898 – hence it is sometimes called ‘Plombieres’.   Lavage attendants had the unenviable task of having to sift through the results of the douche to exam the contents, and then write a detailed report of their findings!  See Whorton for a full grisly description (References).

It seems as if the treatment, usually referred to as Hydrocolonotherapy or Colonic irrigation, is still on offer; but only privately, it is not available on the NHS (claiming that there is little evidence of any health benefits, despite around 6,000 people having it each year in the UK).  

This treatment would be combined with a bath and sub-aqueous douche.   The word douche is simply French for to wash or soak (or shower), but came to name a medical treatment of irrigating parts of the body, or the apparatus used in this procedure.  

The practice of using water as the principle means of treating various ailments – hydrotherapy, then known as hydropathy – dates back at least to ancient Greece.  The modern form originated with an Austrian, Vincent Priessnitz, who practiced his cold water treatment in Gräfenberg from the 1820s.  This became very popular attracting many from the aristocracy, including monarchs.  This was brought to England by Dr. James Wilson and Dr James Manby Gully, who established a water cure at Malvern in the 1840s: again attracting famous people of the day, among them Charles Darwin.  Hydropathy was also popularised in several publications by a Captain Richard Claridge.  Later, hydropathy was taken up by John Smedley, opening his Matlock Hydropathic Establishment in 1851.

The cure that patients received here wasn’t that different from that on offer at Harrogate.  Having had a solid diet of brown bread and porridge, whilst abstaining from alcohol, the treatment consisted of: dripping sheets, sitz (sit) baths, sniffing baths, douches, leg and hand baths, rubbing, Ling’s exercises (after the gymnastics of Swede Pehr Henrik Ling), galvanism and faradism, including rectal faradization for constipation (Barclay, References) – see the Context for Electrical Treatment.  This is an example of that strand of the spa movement that stressed the ‘scientific’ side of the treatment, rather than the ‘natural’ aspect.  Much of the treatment was for rheumatoid arthritis.

Some of the treatments had more support within the medical establishment than others.  There was a strong ‘spiritual’ or religious trend, especially in the US.  Leading the way in this was Dr John Kellogg (of cornflakes fame).  He was the Medical Officer to the Seventh Day Adventist Health reform Institute in Michigan.  He published a handbook in 1880 that covered hydropathy, electrotherapy and Swedish Remedial Gymnastics.  His later Rational Hydrotherapy of 1900 included the treatment – for those suffering from mania or a skin disease – of one continuous bath that could last up to a year!  Hydrotherapy become more established and was used to treat injured soldiers during and after the First World War.  Indeed the Great War gave a boost to electric treatments and massage.  The latter had revived in the 1880s after interest shown from the British Medical Journal.  A group of women masseuses launched the Society of Trained Masseuses in 1894, to go beyond the untrained rubbing common in spas and Turkish baths.   At this time massage was seen as a treatment for ‘nervous disorder’. 

One of the pioneers of the types of treatment to be seen in the film was, rather unlikely, an Indian, Sake Dean Mahomed (the first to write a book in English and who also opened the first Indian take away restaurant in England: the Hindustani Coffee House in London).  When he moved to Brighton with his Irish wife in 1814 he also opened the first shampooing vapour masseur bath in England.   According to the Black History website: “He described the treatment in a local paper as 'The Indian Medicated Vapour Bath (a type of Turkish bath), a cure to many diseases and giving full relief when everything fails; particularly rheumatic and paralytic, gout, stiff joints, old sprains, lame less, aches and pains in the joints'.”  King George IV and William IV appointed him as their shampooing surgeon in Brighton.  His treatment, however, of shampooing and massage using aromatic herbal bath and given an Indian sheen, sounds much more appealing than that later offered at Harrogate.

The use of enemas during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth was common, promoted by charlatans like Charles Tyrrell.  Yet others, like the famous surgeon William Arbuthnot Lane, also grappling to find treatments for problems with the colon, eventually recognised the importance of a good diet and exercise – well ahead of his time.  Indeed, the Victorian period saw a prolific rise in ‘natural’ remedies of one kind or another, rebelling against the use of drugs – plus ça change.  Alternative medicine, especially relating to diet, was a growth movement, especially in the US.  Needless to say, all these treatments could only be afforded by those able to pay.

Alongside of the spas, Charles Bartholomew and David Urquhart opened a number of Turkish baths in various cities, beginning in Bedminster, Bristol, in 1859.  Municipal councils had been opening baths and wash houses since the first one was introduced by Liverpool City Council in 1842.  Bartholomew’s baths took up many of the features of the spas: “Spa therapy could be reproduced by means of chemical additions and mechanical and electrical devices.”  He also introduced an Inhalatorium, where patients breathed scented vents or oxygen, and an Emanatorium, with radioactive waters and inhalation of radium emanations.

If one wanted to put the phenomenon of spas and their treatments in their widest context, one might want to look at the writings of those like Charles Taylor, who have charted the growth of our modern conception of the self, and how this has shaped our culture.  We tend to take for granted the way our culture views our individual self in relation to the world, but as Roy Porter notes in his celebrated history of medicine, this hasn’t always been so:  “The West has evolved a culture preoccupied with the self, with the individual and his or her identity, and this quest has been equated with (or reduced to) the individual body and the embodied personality, expressed through body language.” (References, p. 7)  Recent failings in plastic surgery, and the contentious issue of whether the NHS should pay in cases involving a lifestyle choice, highlight this point. 

References

Jean Barclay, In Good Hands: The History of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy 1894-1994, Butterworth-Heinemann, 1994.
Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity, Fontana Press, 1999.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge University Press, 1989.
James C. Whorton, Inner Hygiene: Constipation and the Pursuit of Health in Modern Society, Oxford University Press, 2000 (partly online at Google books)
Doubtful Theories, Drastic Therapies:
Micaela Sullivan-Fowler, Autointoxication and Faddism in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Intestinal Lavage, The Free Dictionary
Black History website
The 'Shampooing Surgeon': Sake Dean Mahomed