During Mental Health Awareness week we reflect on the Quaker Tapestry panel True Health, highlighting the important contribution made by Quakers to the medical profession from the seventeenth century onwards.
Quakers and other non-conformists were barred from mainstream medical training in England but were able to train as apothecaries. Finding ways to qualify and practice enabled them to make a significant difference to the development of better health. They focused on preventative medicine by attention to the holistic view, including diet, exercise, housing and living conditions.
The motto at the bottom of the panel “a feeling heart is the first requisite of a surgeon” expresses the way Quaker practitioners related to people with mental illness, in contrast to the normal practice at the time of shutting them away in asylums.
The breadth of thinking included William Tuke’s pioneering approach to mental health in England and his reform of conditions. After being appalled by the inhumane conditions and brutal abuses he saw in the York Asylum, he raised funds to open The Retreat in York in 1796 (pictured bottom left). A pioneering project where patients were housed in pleasant conditions with good food and therapeutic occupations referred to as ‘moral therapy’. His work of addressing mental health needs continues today having been taken up by his prominent Quaker family.
Yorkshire born John Fothergill (pictured top right) was able to start practicing in 1740 having started out as an apothecary’s apprentice and then finishing his medical qualification in Edinburgh. He emphasised the benefits of diet, regular exercise and fresh air. His hobby was researching in the extensive botanical garden of rare plants which he created at Upton, now called Ham House from 1762. He is also named on our ‘Botanists’ tapestry panel.
In the twentieth century George Newman (pictured centre) first Senior Medical Officer of Health in Finsbury, was concerned about overcrowding, and went himself on inspections from midnight to 5am, summer and winter, to find the actual number of men, women and children sleeping under horrible conditions.
Benjamin Beale’s promotion of the remedial effects of sea bathing (pictured bottom centre) is depicted by Beales horse drawn ‘Bathing Machine’. Though we don’t require such contraptions to enter the sea today such ‘Wild Swimming’ is very relevant today, with a recent resurgence in cold water therapies being built into our health and well-being routines.
You can view True Health, and other panels, here at Quaker Tapestry Museum, Kendal or on our website
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