Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

Oh, my dear, I have been “packed”! The doctor proposed to “pack” me for courtesy, and I, for curiosity, accepted. So at six in the morning, just when I had fallen into sound sleep, I was roused by a bath-woman coming to my bedside, in a huge white flannel gown, and bidding me turn out. I got on to the floor in a very bewildered state, and she proceeded to double back one half of my bed clothes and feather-bed, spread a pair of blankets on the mattress, then a sheet wrung out of cold water; then bade me strip and lie down. I lay down, and she swathed me with the wet sheet like a mummy; then swathed me with the blankets, my arms pinioned down, exactly, in fact, like a mummy; then rolled back the feather-bed and original bed-clothes on the top of me, leaving out the head; and so left me, for an hour, to go mad at my leisure! I had no sooner fairly realised my situation of being bound hand and foot under a heap of things, than I felt quite frantic, cursed my foolish curiosity, and made horrid efforts to release myself; thought of rolling to the bell, and ringing it with my teeth, but could not shake off the feather-bed; did ultimately get one of my hands turned round, and was thankful for even that change of posture. Dr Nicol says the bath-woman should have stayed with me during the first “pack,” and put a wet cloth on my head; that it was the blood being sent to my head that “caused all this wildness.” Whatever it was, I would not undergo the thing again for a hundred guineas. When the bath-woman came back at seven, I ordered her to take me out instantly. “But the doctor?” The doctor, I told her, had no business with me, I was not a patient. “Oh! then you have only been packed for foon, have you?” “Yes; and very bad fun!” So she filled a slipper-bath to “put me to rights,” and I plunged into that so soon as I was set loose, and she splashed pitcher after pitcher full of water on my head. And this shall be the last of my water-curing, for the present. I feel quite shattered still, with an incipient headache, and am wishing that Forster would come, and take us back to Rawdon.

Comment

Comment

Hydrotherapy can kill, really. Paddington Weighs In deals with a similar horror:

For some reason I class hydrotherapy with hydrophobia.

Something to say? Get in touch

Original

To T. Carlyle, at Galway.

Benrydden: Friday, July 20, 1849.

Oh, my dear, I have been ‘packed!’ The Doctor proposed to ‘pack’ me for courtesy, and I, for curiosity, accepted. So at six in the morning, just when I had fallen into sound sleep, I was roused by a bath-woman coming to my bedside, in a huge white flannel gown, and bidding me turn out. I got on to the floor in a very bewildered state, and she proceeded to double back one half of my bed clothes and feather-bed, spread a pair of blankets on the mattress, then a sheet wrung out of cold water; then bade me strip and lie down. I lay down, and she swathed me with the wet sheet like a mummy; then swathed me with the blankets, my arms pinioned down, exactly, in fact, like a mummy; then rolled back the feather-bed and original bed-clothes on the top of me, leaving out the head; and so left me, for an hour, to go mad at my leisure! I had no sooner fairly realised my situation of being bound hand and foot under a heap of things, than I felt quite frantic, cursed my foolish curiosity, and made horrid efforts to release myself; thought of rolling to the bell, and ringing it with my teeth, but could not shake off the feather-bed; did ultimately get one of my hands turned round, and was thankful for even that change of posture. Dr. Nicol says the bath-woman should have stayed with me during the first ‘pack,’ and put a wet cloth on my head; that it was the blood being sent to my head that ’caused all this wildness.’ Whatever it was, I would not undergo the thing again for a hundred guineas. When the bath-woman came back at seven, I ordered her to take me out instantly. ‘But the doctor?’ The doctor, I told her, had no business with me, I was not a patient. ‘Oh! then you have only been packed for foon, have you?’ ‘Yes; and very bad fun!’ So she filled a slipper-bath to ‘put me to rights,’ and I plunged into that so soon as I was set loose, and she splashed pitcher after pitcher full of water on my head. And this shall be the last of my water-curing, for the present. I feel quite shattered still, with an incipient headache, and am wishing that Forster would come, and take us back to Rawdon.

417 words.

Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

• Ben Rhydding (1) ·
• Carlyle, Jane Welsh (1801-66) (2), Scottish epistolarian, wife of Thomas Carlyle ·
• Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881) (2), Scottish-born essayist, historian, and philosopher ·
• Galway (1) ·
• Hydrotherapy (3) ·
• Ilkley (7) ·
• Ireland (24) ·
• MacLeod, William (1818/19-75) (2), Scottish medical entrepreneur, proprietor of the Ben Rhydding hydropathic spa in the 1850s ·
• Mineral spa (3) ·
• Rawdon, West Yorkshire (4) ·
• William Edward Forster (3) ·

All tags.

Similar

• 17 July 1849: Jane Carlyle witnesses civic Bradford protest the suppression by the French Second Republic of Garibaldi and Mazzini’s anti-clerical Roman Republic
• 23 January 1643: Thomas Fairfax, the Rider of the White Horse, captures Leeds from the Beast with the help of Psalm 68
• 13 August 1877: For want of a bathroom, T. Clifford Allbutt almost loses a feverish patient
• 1 March 1857: Job Senior, the Wharfedale Hermit and a pioneering polyphonic overtone singer, dies at Burley in Wharfedale
• 5 August 1661: John Ray visits Copgrove (Harrogate), the pauper’s spa
• 26 August 1914: From Pontefract to the mines on the Franco-Belgian border: Cpl. Frederick William Holmes wins a VC at Le Cateau
• 8 January 1844: Members of the 70th (Surrey) Regiment of Foot stationed at Leeds riot against a graffito
• 30 January 1934: The wife of the Vicar of Weston, near Otley, has a nocturnal premonition of the death of the composer Frederick Delius
• 31 January 1833: Thomas Tennant, Mayor of Leeds, tells a court how he was mugged on Bank Street on his return from a business trip south
• 13 June 1876: Christopher Jackman (sculptor) and Charles Barrett (tailor) are charged with having been in enclosed premises for an unlawful purpose at the home of the Bradford MP, Henry Ripley