Was Joseph Pilates a sickly child? The story and the record
Almost every studio website tells the same origin story. Joseph Pilates, born in Mönchengladbach in 1883, was a frail boy who suffered from asthma, rickets and rheumatic fever, and he built his method to rescue his own body before he used it on anyone else's. The story turns up in teacher training manuals, in the introductions to exercise books, and on the about pages of studios that never otherwise mention Germany.
It is a good story. The trouble is that it rests almost entirely on what Pilates, and later his widow Clara, told journalists decades afterwards. Very little of it rests on any document from his childhood. What follows sets out where the story comes from, what the records can and cannot tell us, and how a careful teacher might pass it on.
What is documented about his early life
Some things are not in dispute. Joseph Hubertus Pilates was born on 9 December 1883 in Mönchengladbach, then part of the Kingdom of Prussia. The family was not well off. His father was a metalworker and a keen gymnast, active in one of the local gymnastics clubs that every German town of any size had by then, and the boy trained in gymnastics, and later in boxing and weight training, from an early age.
Records of that kind (births, registrations, addresses, deaths in the family) are what biographers have to work with. They tell you where a family lived and who was born into it. They say nothing about whether a particular child wheezed on the stairs. As far as I have been able to find, no medical record from his childhood has been published, and none of the three illnesses usually attached to his name appears in any document from the time.
Where the story comes from
The account seems to start with Pilates himself. In the last fifteen years or so of his life his studio on Eighth Avenue in New York drew the attention of dance writers and newspaper feature editors, and in those interviews he presented himself as a boy who had been weak and had made himself strong. Dance press profiles in the 1950s and a New York Herald Tribune feature in 1964 carried versions of that idea.
The specific word asthma appears to have arrived later. As far as the press coverage has been traced, it enters print in the early 1970s, after his death, in features that drew on conversations with Clara. From there it moved into the books written during the Pilates boom of the 1990s and 2000s, and from the books onto the internet, where each retelling tends to gain confidence and lose its source. Rickets and rheumatic fever joined the list somewhere along the way. I have not seen either traced to anything written while he was a child.
Why strongmen liked a weak start
There is a plain reason to be wary. In the physical culture world Pilates grew up in, the weak-child origin story was close to a convention. Eugen Sandow, the most famous strongman of the age and a figure Pilates is often said to have admired, presented himself in Strength and How to Obtain It (1897) as a delicate child. A generation later Charles Atlas sold his mail-order course on the claim that he had once been a "97-pound weakling". The story does a job. If the method rebuilt a frail boy, it can surely help the reader.
Pilates was a showman as well as a teacher, and the sickly boy is not the only part of his biography that is hard to pin down. The claims that he trained police officers in England before the First World War, or that his exercises kept his fellow internees safe during the 1918 influenza pandemic, are repeated just as often and documented just as poorly. It would be strange if the childhood story were the one part of the legend that met a stricter standard. (His wider cultural background, which is better documented, is covered in our piece on Kneipp, Mensendieck and Steiner.)
A historian's view
The German historian Eva Rincke, whose biography of Joseph Pilates was published in 2015, examined the asthma question for that book and came away sceptical. My own reading of the evidence points the same way. The documented picture (a boy in his father's gymnastics club, training hard from childhood, describing himself by early adulthood as a gymnast, boxer and self-defence instructor) fits a sturdy child at least as well as a sickly one.
None of that proves he was never ill. Children in the 1880s caught serious infections routinely, and in an era when many German children died young, any child who reached adulthood had probably been through a good deal. But "a frail child with asthma, rickets and rheumatic fever" is a very specific claim, and specific claims need specific evidence. So far, nobody has produced it.
Students of the method have always learnt the story the way Romana Kryzanowska and her contemporaries did, from Joe himself. That makes it a valuable record of how he wanted to be seen. It does not make it a medical history.
Questions teachers ask
Did Joseph Pilates have asthma?
There is no contemporary evidence that he did. The claim comes from interviews given decades later, and the word asthma itself seems to have entered print only after his death.
Did he write about his childhood health in his books?
His two books, Your Health (1934) and Return to Life Through Contrology (1945), are an argument for his method and a programme of exercises. Neither is a memoir, and neither offers a medical history of his boyhood.
Does it matter, if the exercises work?
It matters because teachers pass the story to clients and trainees as fact, and because the method does not need it. Contrology has lasted for a century on the strength of what it does in a session, as the long view in a century of Pilates makes clear, and an origin myth adds nothing to that.
How should I tell it instead?
Attribute it. Put the story in his mouth, where it belongs, and leave out the diagnoses nobody has documented.
For a training manual or a studio's history page, one sentence does the job: "Pilates later described himself as a sickly child who built himself up through exercise, although there is little documentary evidence for the specific illnesses usually listed." It is shorter than most versions of the legend, and every word of it is true.
