Medical treatment was carried out by the Ambulance staff who were kept consistently busy treating wounds received by the men in the course of their work.

At Silverwood the first bath house was installed around 1939, prior to that the miners went home exactly as they emerged from the depths, as Johnny Cash wrote in a prelude to a Merle Travis song " Nothing clean but the whites of his eyes"

Most of the houses back then did not have a bath as we know today, and so water was boiled, and an old tin bath was used, usually placed in front of the fireplace. So the miner would sit in his bath enjoying the warmth of a fire, whilst probably having a cuppa' .

It is worth noting that in the early part of the last century that a lot of Miners had very little other clothing than the clothes they went to work in. Gradually as their lot improved some of them became very snappy dressers in their leisure time.
On Doncaster Road just down from Doctor Sedgewicks was a small shop owned by Ethel and her husband Jack Thresh pre 1960. Ethel used to make pit pants for the miners and sell them in the shop as a sideline, I gather they were a type of shorts:
Chewing tobacco was often used by miners whilst underground and though this may sound like a particular disgusting habit, it served a purpose. It kept the mouth moist and also collected a lot of dust from within the mouth, the combination of dust and tobacco juice was spat out constantly. Fred Spencer whilst attending a local chat show recalls George Speight aka Paul Shane being interviewed and telling the host of the time he had his first taste of chewing tobacco and being violently sick immediately after.

Fred also recalls,
"I started at Silverwood in 1955 at the age of fifteen, along with several other school leavers, I recall a number of the names, there was of course George Speight, Alf Lord, Garry Frith, and John Longden We travelled by Coal Board bus to the Manvers Main Colliery, the training centre, where young lads of a similar age, joined us from other South Yorkshire Collieries"

There is little doubt that the coal industry in great Britain was one of the major reasons for the rise in the power and wealth of England during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Miners were aware of this, and took great pride in the knowledge of just how important to the economy coal mining was.