Papworth: its place in medical history
Papworth today is a strikingly large village west of Cambridge, whose name, thanks to its NHS Hospital, is synonymous in many people’s minds with the treatment of heart disease, and thanks to the Papworth Trust, is to others with physical disabilities synonymous with support and training. But this is a remarkably recent thing, a creation of barely fifty years. Lying behind these twin contributions to health and social care lies, in its day, an equally significant contribution to health and society as nationally the leading centre in the treatment and rehabilitation of tuberculosis, the most widespread and intractable of health problems of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain.
Consumption or phthisis, the disease identified by the German microbiologist Koch as caused by invasion of the tuberculosis bacillus (TB), that gave it its modern name, blighted the lives of millions in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, as it did many times over worldwide.
It was the cause of one in eight deaths overall, but even worse in certain sectors of the population. One in three men, aged 15-44, who should have been at the peak of productive life, died of TB, and one in two of women, aged 15-24. It was worst amongst the poor in the slum housing of industrial towns, managing to maintain a preeminence despite the stiff competition of myriad other diseases, but neither the middle classes nor the countryside were immune, as deaths of the famous, such as those of the Brontë sisters or R.L. Stevenson, continue to remind us.
So significant an assault on the health of the population, a drain alike on economic productivity and military capacity, that filled the infirmary wards of the workhouses and sapped the medical poor law relief, could not go unanswered.
Scientifically, the search for understanding and effective treatment of tuberculosis became a quest of heroic proportions, begging questions in the forefront of research in the growing areas of physiology, microbiology and pathology, giving rise to grand international conferences of scientists and to royal commissions of inquiry. In Victorian Britain vast sanatoria were constructed with voluntary subscriptions to fill the gap which other voluntary hospitals would not supply for fear of infection. Eventually, under the social reforms of the Liberal government of 1910-16, notification to the authorities of illness with TB was required, sanatorium benefit was established as discrete element of National Insurance legislation, and the local authorities, in conjunction with medical practitioners, were prodded into providing a network of sanatoria and dispensaries.
In Cambridgeshire, due to the happy coincidence of several persons with vision and energy, in scientific research in the university and in the official bodies charged with healthcare of the local population, amongst whom Pendrill (later Sir Pendrill) Varrier-Jones was the dynamo, this led to the establishment of the Papworth Village Settlement, unique and internationally famous. In the central decades of the century it became the foremost settlement of its kind dealing with the biggest health problem of the age.
Out of this institution more than any other grew in Britain the modern concepts of rehabilitation of the disabled and surgical intervention in heart disease, and gave birth to what has become the Papworth Trust and Papworth Hospital. It is a process that has left an extensive documentary legacy, of papers, publications, photographs, cine film, and in the experiences of those who have lived through and been involved in these developments.
The Papworth Archives Project was established by Cambridgeshire Archives Service with funding from the Wellcome Trust to deal with this magnificent documentary heritage.