Thinking about A.A. Alexander’s ‘Healthful Exercises for Girls‘ that recommended the traveling rings in 1902 reminds me of the health-history of swings…long before they were associated with the amusement of children (that’s basically a twentieth century idea) swings were for grown-ups. First in private gardens (ala the famous Fragonard painting The Swing) then in semi-public ‘pleasure gardens’–which had overlaps with what we would today call a spa –places for ‘healthful recreations’.
In 1783, joining a surge of interest in the effects of kinetics and gravity on health, James Carmichael Smith published An Account of the Effects of Swinging, Employed as a Remedy in the Pulmonary Consumption and Hectic Fever. Swings were particularly recommended for the elderly and the overweight, as recorded by painter John Nixon (c. 1750-1818) in this watercolor of the swings at Sydney Gardens in Bath, which are now remembered mostly for being nearby to the home of Jane Austen during her family’s residence there.
[image via bonhams]
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