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The photographs in this exhibition, taken between 50 and 85 years ago, give us a unique insight into life inside a tuberculosis sanatorium. They do not offer a pictorial record of day-to-day events because the people who took them were, first and foremost, recording their happiest moments. Photography is all about happy memories, after all. We do not see the sadness, pain, disappointment and fear that many of these children and young adults experienced during months, often years, inside the walls of Craig-y-nos. What the pictures do reveal, in a most evocative way, is a youthful stoicism and zest for life at a time when TB in the industrial areas of south Wales claimed the lives of 12 young men and 17 young women a year in every community of 6000 people. Hundreds more, like the children of Craig-y-nos, were deprived by chronic ill health, of education, work and family life.
This exhibition is part of an oral history project in which we are recording the memories of many of the people you will see in the photographs. It will be the first ever collective account by patients and staff of life inside a tuberculosis sanatorium and is therefore a unique heritage project. The time period, from the 1920s to the 1950s, is also crucial because of the tremendous activity by medical professionals and other groups to understand the nature of tuberculosis, who was most likely to catch it, how to diagnose it, and how to treat it. Although tuberculosis was known to be an infectious disease caused by a microscopic organism (Mycobacterium Tuberculosis), the real treatment breakthrough came in 1947 when the first effective medicine, an antibiotic called streptomycin, became available in Britain. The children of Craig-y-nos were among the first to receive this new 'wonder' drug.
Craig-y-nos was the estate of Adelina Patti, the world famous opera singer, from 1878 until her death in 1919. It was purchased two years later for £19,000 by the King Edward VII Welsh National Memorial Association, an organisation founded in 1910 to combat tuberculosis in Wales. After reconstruction as a sanatorium that could provide open-air treatment, it was named the Adelina Patti Hospital and admitted its first patients in August 1922. This is when we, too, first enter its freshly varnished doors, only departing in the summer of 1959 when its young patients are transferred to The South Wales Sanatorium at Talgarth.
For 37 years, Craig-y-nos provided the pure, invigorating air swirling around balconies open to the elements that was considered beneficial, even curative, in patients with tuberculosis. Its situation amongst pinewoods in a magnificent rural environment on the edge of the Brecon Beacons in the Upper Swansea Valley, provides the backdrop to many of the photographs in this remarkable exhibition.
Dr Carole Reeves - Outreach Historian
The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL
183 Euston Road
London NW1 2BE
Tel: 0207 679 8135
email: c.reeves@ucl.ac.uk
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