David Ruggles

David Ruggles was an African American abolitionist, journalist and bookseller in New York City who became one of the most active agents of the Underground Railroad, by his own account helping several hundred people escape slavery, including Frederick Douglass. Years of relentless activism, threats and physical attacks wore down his health, and by the early 1840s he had lost much of his eyesight and was in general physical decline. He moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, where he took up hydropathy, the water cure movement then spreading through reform circles, and found enough relief in it to train seriously in the method. In 1845 he opened one of the first water cure establishments in the United States, treating patients with baths, wet wrapping and regulated diet. The practice supported him for the rest of his short life and made him a notable, if now often overlooked, figure in the early history of American hydrotherapy.