Description:In this photograph wounded soldiers are undergoing ‘electric treatment’ in the Auxiliary Hospital at Highbury, which specialised in orthopaedics as did Birmingham No.2 War Hospital at Hollymoor. Rubery military hospital also had a radiant bath and an electric chair for hydroelectric therapy,<small><sup>1</sup></small> but it was Hollymoor that was selected as the Birmingham Special Military Surgical Hospital. It was rewired and developed to care exclusively for orthopaedic cases, being ‘equipped with all the costly instruments, apparatus and baths which modern experience has shown to be useful’.<small><sup>2</sup></small> In January 1918 two wards were converted into ‘a massage and electrical department and gymnasium’ and a large new building for ‘curative workshops’ was erected. The first surgeons were American, although it became possible to gradually replace them with British trainees. As many as twenty were attached to the institution for periods of two to three months.
Electrotherapy was a staple in convalescent therapy. Pain is reduced by pulsating currents, which strengthen damaged muscles and nerve endings, causing them to contract and relax. It was recognised that ‘in many cases it must be applied daily for weeks and months’ and that ‘residence in and the “atmosphere” of a convalescent hospital is favourable to recovery’; and secondly that ‘by associated and successive treatments, daily repeated- including heat, moisture, massage, electricity, and movement [...] more lasting effect is produced than can be obtained, either by the same agencies singly or by any other form of treatment’.<small><sup>3</sup></small>
The therapy was satirised in 'Massage, Syn: Distilled Torture; Wangler’s Delight', which described it as ‘pre-determined and deliberate scientific bruising, combined with forcible movements of such stiff and painful joints as you may possess, together with the application of strong electric currents (with or without the buzzer) to every acutely sensitive nerve in the body’.<small><sup>4</sup></small> Electrotherapy was described as being a brutal means of stimulation ‘which causes the intensest pain and the maximum involuntary movement,’ while the whole treatment produces a body in which ‘all joints have an unlimited range of movement in every direction, so that you may after the war follow the profession of contortionist.’ Such comic representation of remedial massage reveals something of the patients' fear of the masseuses as perpetrators of pain. The cure-all vibrator, for instance, which can be seen in action in these photographs, is described as ‘a recent addition to the munitions of massage’. Just as they had done in the trenches, these soldiers experienced simultaneous acceptance of, and recoil from, this new form of suffering, a fate they met with characteristic stoicism and humour.
<font color="#666633"><small><sup>1</sup> War Hospital Minutes, 4 October 1916
<sup>2</sup> Marriott Cooke and C. Hubert Bond, 'History of Asylum War Hospitals in England and Wales: Report to the Secretary of State for the Home Department by British Parliamentary Paper', (London: HMSO., 1920) Cmd 899
<sup>3</sup> R. Fortescue Fox and J. Campbell McClure, ‘A New Combined Physical Treatment for Wounded and Disabled Soldiers: Heat Massage, Electricity, Movements’, The Lancet, 5 February 1916, p.311
<sup>4</sup> BICEPS, ‘Massage Syn: Distilled Torture; Wangler’s Delight’, The “Southern” Cross, Vol.2, No.16, April 19</small></font>