In the late 1960s, when I was at primary school, I used to get an afternoon off once a fortnight to go to Baguley Chest Clinic (Wythenshawe Hospital).
As a childhood asthma sufferer, it was thought that I needed regular physiotherapy to help my chest. I have very vivid memories of white coated physiotherapists putting me on a table that tipped head downwards and then bashing and shaking my chest and back to make me cough.
Although it sounds a bit of an ordeal, I actually remember it as quite a funny experience, (I used to get told off for giggling when I was supposed to be coughing) and it got me off school for the afternoon as an added bonus.
Another side benefit of my asthma was that it got me out of drinking the dreaded school milk (because dairy products were then thought to be bad for asthmatics ) I hated milk , especially after it had sat on a school radiator for half a morning , so being banned from drinking it was a real treat !
From memory, the chest clinic I attended at Baguley was in one of the old EMS "huts”. The huts were built during WW2 at what was then Baguley Sanatorium, to help them cope with the war wounded.
The Baguley Sanatorium was opened by the Withington Urban District Council, as a hospital for the treatment of infectious diseases in 1902.
In 1912, Baguley Sanatorium was given over entirely to the treatment of Tuberculosis, with the treatment of other infectious diseases transferred to Monsall Hospital.
It was thought that the clean air of countrified Baguley would act as a tonic to sufferers from the smokey city of Manchester.
Many of the activities at the Sanatorium were carried on outdoors to take full benefit of the fresh air.
Patients on the road to recovery were encouraged to take part in therapeutic activities and to be out in the open air as part of their treatment, these included outdoor exercise and games, helping on the sanatoriums own farm and working in the patients workshop .
Because some of the sanatorium patients would be in hospital for months or even years, I imagine they were glad of these diversions, each day must have been really long.
Sadly, some patients at the sanatorium would never recover. Tuberculosis was a mass killer that was only really brought under any sort of control when streptomycin was discovered in the 1940s.
Many families lost someone to this awful disease and others would find that their life's ambitions were lost forever because of the lasting effects debilitating illness they had suffered from for so long.
A book by Robert Price Davies gives insight into the day to day lives of the people who were treated at the Sanatorium. I was not surprised to find that, despite the strict rules and regulations and the day to day sadness that the staff and patients must have encountered there is a general feeling that patients here
“just got on with it”
This comes as no surprise to me, as I have spent a long time working with people who have lived through the first half of the last century, with wars and all sorts of other hardships and greatly admire their stoicism and fortitude.
Occasionally when you have an interest in history, you find something that offers you an extra bit of insight into something you thought you already understood. When reading about the workshops and activities at the sanatorium, I had presumed that the patients made things for themselves, or as gifts for relatives and friends.
I was reading a Manchester City Council Yearbook from 1936. The book listed the events and achievements of the city in that year.
The yearbook also contains a number of advertisements from local companies, amongst these; I found a little insight into how enterprising the managers of the Sanatorium were.
The advert for
"Baguley Crafts” tells us that there was some forward thinking around. Selling some of the items produced by the patients obviously allowed them to buy materials to sustain this therapeutic activity.
I would also like to think that the existence of "Baguley Crafts” meant that someone at the Sanatorium understood the value of boosting a person’s morale , when they might otherwise be at their lowest ebb , by demonstrating that something they had produced was desirable and by showing them that they still had valuable skills .
Having the ambition to finish a project and to see it on sale will have played a crucial part in helping patients look forward, rather than back, and allowed them to remain positive on the difficult road to recovery. Another example of this generation of people finding a silver lining for almost every cloud.
© Sally Dervan
Pictures;
courtesy of Sally Dervan
.png)
