David Ruggles: Abolitionist, Healer & Pioneer of the Therapeutic Bath
The radical freedom fighter who introduced hydrotherapy to America — and whose legacy still flows through natural healing today.
"There is a curious irony in the fact that a Negro was the means of introducing the therapeutic bathhouse into this country." - Journal of the National Medical Association (PMC Archives)
At Rooted in Natural Health, we believe healing is never separate from history. The hydrotherapies we practice — the steam, the cold sheet wrap, the constitutional therapy, did not arrive in America by accident. They were pioneered, in part, by a Black man who had already risked his life for freedom and now, in broken health, turned that same fierce determination toward the healing of bodies. His name was David Ruggles, and his story deserves to be told.
A Life Forged in Fire: The Man Who Built the First Black Bookstore — and Tore Open a Slave Ship
Born a free Black man in 1810 in Norwich, Connecticut, David Ruggles grew up in a world where freedom was always under siege. He arrived in New York City as a young man and did what only the boldest dared…he built. He opened what historians widely regard as the first Black-owned bookstore in the United States, a shop that doubled as an antislavery print shop, a gathering place, and an organizing hub. He printed pamphlets, named names, and published the identities of slave catchers operating in New York's streets. For a free Black man in 1830s America, this was not simply activism. It was guerrilla warfare.
He became a leader of the New York Committee of Vigilance, a biracial group dedicated to protecting free Black New Yorkers from the gangs of kidnappers who, Ruggles stated, were "infesting the city and countryside", capturing people, free or fugitive, and selling them south into slavery. Ruggles published his home address in the papers so that frightened families could find him. He was both journalist and soldier, pen and shield.
"Practical abolitionism", those were Ruggles' own words for what he did. Not speeches. Not petitions. Action, in the dark, at great personal risk.
In December 1836, word reached him of a small vessel in New York Harbor carrying enslaved Africans — a Portuguese slave ship conducting illegal trade right under the city's nose. Ruggles investigated, confirmed what was happening, and had the captain arrested on charges of illegal slave trading. When the captain was swiftly released on bail, the Black community's anger reached a boiling point.
On Christmas Eve of that same year, members of the Committee of Vigilance and allied Black activists stormed the vessel, armed for self-defense, and freed at least two enslaved Africans held on board. When a sailor tried to stop them, a rescuer reportedly cocked a pistol and made his intent unmistakably clear. This was what Ruggles meant by practical abolitionism. No waiting for the law. The law had already failed.
The Price of Freedom: Targeted, Hunted & Nearly Taken
Ruggles' courage made him a target. Soon after the slave ship rescue, a plot was hatched involving the ship's captain, a professional slave catcher, and at least one New York City police officer, to kidnap Ruggles himself and send him south into slavery as retaliation.
In the dead of night, an armed mob forced their way into his home. Ruggles later wrote that they came "like hungry dogs," with one threatening him at knifepoint. He narrowly escaped. He then brought his attackers to public accountability, exposing the plot at a police station and through the press. The system that was supposed to protect him had helped plan his abduction. He named every name.
His bookstore had already been destroyed by a mob in 1835. By the early 1840s, after years of sustained harassment, stress, and relentless overwork, his body was beginning to break. David Ruggles, still in his early thirties, was going blind. In severe pain and nearly without sight, he did what he had always done — he sought a solution, not surrender.
From the Underground Railroad to the First Hydrotherapy Establishment in America
Before his health failed him entirely, Ruggles made one more extraordinary contribution to American history. He helped shepherd a young man named Frederick Augustus Bailey, not yet known to the world as Frederick Douglass — through New York City, connecting him with Anna Murray and putting him on the path to lasting freedom. Estimates suggest that Ruggles personally aided at least 600 people in their escape from slavery over the course of his activism. But when his own body became the prison, he turned inward.
He had heard of the European water-cure movement — hydropathy — which used alternating hot and cold water, steam, and wet wraps to stimulate the body's own healing intelligence. He traveled to Florence, Massachusetts, near Northampton, where he would spend the last years of his life not in defeat, but in creation.
According to the historical record, David Ruggles erected the first building in the United States to be used exclusively for hydrotherapeutic purposes. Though his work in hydrotherapy was limited to the last six years of his short life — and he operated his own establishment for only the final three — the impact was immediate and lasting.
Among those who sought healing at his water-cure establishment were William Lloyd Garrison, the nation's most prominent abolitionist editor, and Sojourner Truth, the formerly enslaved preacher, prophet, and freedom fighter. The man who had once sheltered the hunted was now healing the weary.
David Ruggles died in 1849 at the age of 39.
A journal excerpt describing his life called this history "a curious irony." We call it a profound truth: that the therapeutic bathhouse — the very architecture of water healing in America, was built by Black hands and Black vision, in a body that had already endured more than most would survive. The history of hydrotherapy in this country cannot honestly be told without David Ruggles at its center.
Ancient Waters, Forgotten in the West — Until Ruggles
Hydrotherapy is among humanity's oldest medicines. The ancient Greeks and Romans built elaborate bathhouses, understanding instinctively that water — hot, cold, flowing, still — held power over the body. Islamic civilizations, the inheritors of Greek medical science, maintained and refined these traditions through centuries when Europe had largely abandoned them. Medieval Christian Europe, suspicious of the public bath as a site of moral corruption, converted bathhouses into churches. Travelers from Muslim lands reportedly were stunned by the odor of Christian cities — places that had literally traded hygiene for theology.
Not until the Renaissance did sanitation begin to recover its footing in the West. And not until a half-blind Black abolitionist built a structure in the hills of western Massachusetts did America have its first building dedicated solely to the practice of hydrotherapy. The ancient Greeks would have recognized what Ruggles was doing. The Romans would have honored it. And we, at Rooted in Natural Health, carry it forward.
His Legacy, Our Practice: We Carry the Tradition He Started
At Rooted in Natural Health, we practice hydrotherapy as David Ruggles understood it — not as luxury, but as medicine. Not as comfort alone, but as the body's birthright. Below are three of the core hydrotherapeutic modalities we offer, each rooted in the same principles that drew Garrison and Sojourner Truth to Ruggles' door.
Colon Hydrotherapy A gentle, thorough cleansing of the colon using warm, purified water. By supporting the body's natural eliminative function, colon hydrotherapy relieves toxin burden, supports digestive health, and creates the internal space for deeper healing to begin. It is an essential reset for the terrain of the whole body.
Steam Therapy with Cold Sheet Wrap Finish Steam opens the pores, raises core temperature, and drives circulation to the surface. The cold sheet wrap then brings the body's healing response powerfully inward in a thermic reaction that stimulates lymphatic movement, supports detoxification through the skin, and strengthens the body's vital force. This is precisely the kind of treatment Ruggles' contemporaries experienced in his establishment.
Constitutional (Alternating Hot & Cold) Therapy The foundational practice of hydrotherapy: alternating applications of heat and cold to drive circulation, reduce inflammation, train the vascular system, and ignite the body's innate healing intelligence. This is the water-cure in its purest form — the same practice Ruggles brought to America over 175 years ago, now refined and delivered with the care your body deserves.
Honor the Legacy. Heal the Body. Reclaim What Is Yours.
David Ruggles gave America the therapeutic bathhouse. We give you access to it — affordably, naturally, and with the full weight of this tradition behind every session.
Book your hydrotherapy session with Rooted in Natural Health today.
Historical sources: Journal of the National Medical Association (PMC Archives), David Ruggles Center, UMass Documenting Early Black Lives, University of North Carolina Press.