One of the most popular alternative cures in the nineteenth century involved water — lots of water. Balneology, balneotherapy, or “the cold water cure” was popular on mainland Europe, in England, and in the United States. Spas flourished in England, for example, and scientist Charles Darwin credited the cold water cure with the recreation of his system after serious digestive problems left him almost prostrate and unable to work.
Frontispiece portrait of Priessnitz.
In Six Months at Graefenberg, H.C. Wright tells about his own cure at a German cold water spa run by a balneologist called Priessnitz (there’s an interesting article on Priessnitz and water therapy in the first volume of British Journal of Balneology and Climatology from 1897.) Wright talks about the cold water therapy in vivid detail and his own treatment apparently involved such enjoyments as a cold sheet wrapped around his body for most of the day, only cold water to drink, long walks in the German countryside regardless of weather, and cold (eventually, tepid) baths at regular intervals throughout the day. The word “spa” hardly conjures such treatment today! Wright, like Darwin, is enthusiastic about the effects of his treatment: “What I may yet enjoy of health and physical comfort, I owe, under Providence, to the water cure…” (9). He even claims that the water cure was effective against an unexpected case of smallpox that sprang up in the spa during his time there.
What makes Six Months an unusual volume is that Wright inserts what he claims are transcripts of long conversations he had with other residents at the spa on a variety of topics, including slavery, anti-war work on which Wright was engaged, religion, and criminal punishment. The conversations are simply inserted into each chapter after a disquisition on the water cure, Priessnitz, or the spa itself; they often seem to have no particular connection to the material that has gone before!
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Do you know if there is some kind of connection between Wright´s work and Thomas Mann´s “magical mountain”? the latter describes not a spa but a stay in the swiss mountains for lung diseases and inserts all kinds of conversations, mostly about philosophy.
thanks.
Hello, Jessica!
I do not know if there is a direct connection between Mann and Wright — it would be interesting to find out — perhaps Mann knew of or had read Wright’s work? Six Months was published in 1845, well before Mountain, but I agree with you that there’s a thematic similarity between the two.