Revolving Huts, Open-Air Schools, and the Rise of the English Sanatorium

Abstract This chapter charts the major changes in medical attitudes and treatment of tuberculosis in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, and the importation of open-air forms of treatment on the Davos model, complete with revolving huts. New anxieties about the infectious nature of tuberculosis and the health of the working classes led to the construction of sanatoria, with verandas and outdoor huts, across Britain in the early twentieth century. The enthusiasm for the curative properties of open air also lay behind the creation of a range of open-air schools in Britain at this period. Yet the idyllic picture of healthy life within the pure air of the Swiss Alps, as depicted in Heidi, maintained its hold on the British cultural imagination, leading to a practice of sending British schoolchildren with health complaints to the Alps, starting in the post-war period and continuing through into the 1960s. The chapter explores the impact of the First World War on Davos and Menton, and British health tourism, and the creation in 1918 of the Papworth Village Settlement or Tuberculosis Colony, establishing a form of Davos in England, with an entire community revolving around tuberculosis, but with provision this time for working-class families. The understanding of tuberculosis, and its impact on body and mind, which lay behind this experiment was drawn directly from the writings of two Davos invalids: John Addington Symonds and Robert Louis Stevenson.