Healing waters: Medicine, Chemistry, Relief and Extraordinary Cures in Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century
Résumés
Cet article explore les usages et la théorie des eaux minérales dans la Grande-Bretagne du dix-huitième siècle, pour montrer comment la guérison peut être perçue comme un phénomène à multiples facettes par les médecins et les patients. Dans la théorie et la pratique médicales autour des eaux, l'amélioration de la santé était avant tout attendue de la purge fournie par la consommation des eaux et des expectorations facilitées par les bains. Au dix-huitième siècle, la guérison s’inscrit sur un continuum d’intensité, allant du simple soulagement à la guérison totale, et le simple soulagement de la douleur pouvait constituer une forme de guérison. Les eaux minérales étaient principalement utilisées pour traiter les maladies chroniques et la longueur du traitement pouvait varier, de quelques jours à quelques semaines, avec de nombreuses réitérations. Enfin, la culture des eaux minérales émane d’une longue tradition catholique des eaux miraculeuses qui a perduré sous diverses formes médicales et populaires. Les eaux minérales permettent de voir comment la question de la guérison se situe au carrefour de la médecine officielle et de la médecine populaire, de l’histoire naturelle et de la production participative de données, de l’histoire religieuse et de l’histoire médicale, et enfin des parcours individuels et des démarches institutionnelles.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés :
histoire de la chimie, histoire du corps, eaux minérales, efficacité, Linden (Diederick Frederick), maladie chronique, miracles, Rutty (John), thermalismeKeywords:
body studies, chronicity, cultural history of health, efficiency, history of chemistry, Linden (Diederick Frederick), mineral waters, miracles, John Rutty, spasPlan
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- 1 Colin Jones, Charity and Bienfaisance: The Treatment of the Poor in the Montpellier Region, 1740-18 (...)
1In his book Charity and Bienfaisance in the Enlightenment, Colin Jones describes the long-winded administrative, medical and religious history of French medical institutions devoted to the poor. He explains that after 1740, the Hôpital Général Saint-Charles in Montpellier, ordained by Louis XIV in 1678, aimed at taking care of the invalid poor – an English equivalent in the poor laws would have been the “impotent poor.” They were elderly people over the age of seventy as well as incapacitated children, orphans and foundlings, as well as children from “over-large famil[ies] receiving treatment within the Hôtel Dieu.”1 The hospital was also responsible for the management and healthcare of the spa of the nearby town of Balaruc-les-Bains, where nursing sisters were sent for the season, in the spring and in the autumn. It was thus working to maintain a tradition of hospitality and charity in Balaruc, while the spa manager there seemed more intent on developing the structure for the middle and upper class with ambitious programs of urban development. This tension sums up the history of eighteenth-century spas, at the intersection of healthcare, charity, leisure and sociability.
- 2 Samuel Cuisinier-Delorme and Sophie Chiari’s volume on spa culture gives an interesting insight int (...)
- 3 See the introduction and Appendix in my book, Murky Waters: British Spas in Eighteenth-Century Medi (...)
2We tend to equate eighteenth-century British spas with Bath, but the word “spa” encompassed a great variety of watering places, spa towns, springs and wells, which were very diverse and numerous in eighteenth-century Britain.2 To explore the great varieties of spas in Britain, I was able to inventory more than three hundred active spas, springs and wells in Britain in the long eighteenth century. I have categorised them by size, and it situates Bath, the most prominent in a varied landscape and widespread phenomenon of treatment, which was used at all levels of society.3 Although many spas were visited only locally, some developed into national and sometimes international points of attraction. They were made popular by various accounts of their comparative benefits in medical treatises in periodicals and literary publications. Detailed chemical and medical analysis of the minerals contained in them were given, along with narratives of the various cases that were cured by the waters. The perusal of the diverse writings about spa waters gives a multi-layered perspective of the water cure.
3Whether they came from wells in small villages, medium-sized spas or the grand spa towns of the eighteenth century such as Bath, Buxton, Tunbridge Wells or Cheltenham, mineral waters were always taken in the hope of improving one’s health. Doctors, apothecaries and assimilated professions that took an interest in the rapidly-developing field of chemistry analysed the composition of these healing waters. They were called “mineral” because they possessed a high concentration of mineral particles such as metal, stone, gas or other substances. They were sometimes categorised into four main types: chalybeate (iron: Tunbridge Wells), sulphurous (sulphur: Harrogate), purging or saline (salts: Cheltenham, Epsom), Chalybeate-Purging (iron and salts: Scarborough) and calcareous (limestone: Bristol).
- 4 See for example Christopher Hamlin, “Chemistry, Medicine, and the Legitimization of English Spas, 1 (...)
- 5 Hamlin, “Chemistry, Medicine, and the Legitimization of English Spas, 1740-1840”, op. cit., p. 69.
- 6 Ibid., p. 72-73. Hamlin refers to T. Bergman, “On the Preparation of Cold Medicated Waters,” Physic (...)
4Waters were analysed and discussed in treatises and scientific publications, which became the object of much debate, for categories were not stable and results varied.4 In his article on the legitimisation of English spas, Christopher Hamlin explains “that mineral water chemistry was for the most part not an independent source of authority, but a product of controversy, that the relevance of chemistry was itself a controverted issue, and that the progress of chemistry does not account for a more rational assessment of spas in the nineteenth century.”5 Chemical analyses were not the sole realm of chemists, either: certain analytical processes, such as the soaking oak gall, a parasite from the oak trees, to detect the presence of iron which had been used for centuries in ink-making, was known to many beyond the circles of chemically-minded scholars. Mineral waters were initially thought to be a single, idiosyncratic blend of minerals, hard to reproduce and dependent on the direct environment and climate (Hoffman), while, later in the century, the components were more systematically identified, and artificial imitation of mineral waters multiplied (Bergman).6 As such, they fully belonged to the pharmacopeia – or Materia Medica – of eighteenth-century healthcare professionals, who would not necessarily prescribe them as last resource, but within a due course of treatment.
5The specificities of the mineral water treatment, however, spurred many doctors and non-medical authors to write about it: it was thus documented in various medical and literary genres, which have become a fertile ground to explore the notion of healing. This article explores various uses and theories of mineral waters in order to show that healing was perceived as a multifaceted phenomenon by doctors and patients alike. I will first examine what healing could mean from the sick people’s point of view, as the enduring experience of chronic ailments transformed the perception of healing, and mineral waters offered various types of cures. Engaging in a curative process, however, implied the management of uncertainty, both about the issue of that process, and about the nature of the process itself, which questions the relationship between uncertainty and expectations of recovery.
Experiences of healing
6Healing was perceived on a continuum of intensity, from mere relief to global cure, and patients paid attention to the alleviation of pain to evaluate the treatment they had received.
- 7 Alexandra Walsham, “Reforming The Waters: Holy Wells and Healing Springs in Protestant England”, St (...)
7“Healing” comes from the Old English hǣlan, which means “restoring to sound health,” emphasising the return to a previous state of health after an ailment, pain or disease. In the humoral frame of thought which was still dominant in the eighteenth century, the idea of restoration through the process of bathing or drinking could thus be completed by the evacuation of the excess of ill humours provoking imbalance and disease. Drinking was in fact often associated with purging and bathing implied sweating, both providing a form of evacuation which patients must have identified with the effect of other purging drugs and methods. Applied to the waters, however, the term “healing” harked back to a religious perception of medicine. “Healing waters” were mostly applied to holy wells or used in the context of foreign or colonial waters, with perhaps a tint of exoticism. Although the etymology differs slightly, the expression echoes holy waters and holy wells (hālig), fraught with a long political history in eighteenth-century Britain, as many holy wells had been stopped during the Reformation.7
- 8 The results of a quantitative search on the Eighteenth Century Collection Online database reveals n (...)
8The term “cure,” which comes from the old French curer from the Latin curare, meaning “taking care of,” was already veering away from the notion of “care” in the eighteenth century with the development of surgery, which focused on solving mechanical issues with a single intervention, rather than a long-term accompaniment of the sick. In the context of mineral waters, “care” is rarely used, but “curing” is used as a verb.8 Whether cure or care, the term insists on the process of transformation from sick to healthy, rather than on the result of this process, i.e. restoration to sound health. Etymology notwithstanding, later uses of the term in the expression “water cure” do insist on process rather than result, and “water cures” were much more associated with the nineteenth-century “thermal fever” than the varied practices of eighteenth-century mineral waters. In the eighteenth century, patients and doctors talked of a “water course,” they went to spas to “take the waters” internally (drinking) or externally (bathing, showers, local poultices). In parallel, the term “watering” was used mostly in derogatory contexts, as shown in the caricature “Misss Dumplin, Ducktail and Tittup returned from Watering” (figure 1) – in this representation from 1778, the only element that might have been healed is the women’s sense of fashion.
Figure 1: Misss Dumplin, Ducktail and Tittup returned from Watering, Etching, 225x350mm.

Source: British Museum [Creative Commons licence] https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_J-5-141
- 9 See Susannah Lyon-Whaley, “Hot Waters, Cold Waters, and Green Spaces”, Histoire, Médecine et Santé, (...)
9The curing process was understood within several overlapping cultural frames which went far beyond the effects of minerals on bodily fluids, or the salutary evacuations provoked by the waters. First, as Susannah Lyon-Whaley has argued in her article on the water treatment of Stuart Queens consort, mobility and the environment were an important ingredient in the cure: sick people were sent to a circumscribed space (often accounted for as an opportunity for exercise) in which nature played an important part with well-kept gardens and long promenades.9 Time was another ingredient in the cure: patients in spa towns stayed for several days, or weeks, and experienced a different sense of time. The time of spa towns was both suspended and cyclical: patients on a water course would take the waters at very specific hours, their visits could be recurrent yet ephemeral. Finally, the effects of the waters were prepared and mitigated: the patient’s bodies were accustomed to the intensity of the water cure by a gradual intake of the waters. Time, mobility and environment were particularly adapted to the treatment of what we would now call “chronic” diseases: some water cures were long-term processes, well-adjusted to the complex tableaux of sick bodies we are presented with in eighteenth-century accounts by patients and doctors alike.
- 10 Diederick Wessel Linden, A treatise on the three medicinal mineral waters at Llandrindod, in Radnor (...)
- 11 Vasset, “A Cure All ?” in Murky Waters, op. cit., p. 92-102.
10The accounts of cures that we have through eighteenth-century treatises, correspondences and diaries are far from monolithic. Unlike specific drugs such as Dr James’ Powders, which were directed at one disease – in this case, the stone –, waters had multiple indications, to such a point that it was sometimes taken for a cure-all. The rock-water of Llandrindod Wells in Wales (Radnorshire), for example, was recommended by a well-established water-doctor, Diederick Wessel Linden, for a series of ailments: “all such chronic Cases, as proceed from a lax Fiber, or a Weakenss of the vascular system”; “Scorbutic Eruptions, that proceed from a Feebleness in the Vis Vitae”; “Weak Nerves. In the periodical Asthma, whether humoral, or spasmodical. In Saint Vituts’s Dance. In Palsies”; “In a seminal Weakness of both Sexes.”10 Such a list can make a twenty-first-century reader wonder about the proximity between quack remedies and mineral waters. And yet, as I have argued elsewhere, many eighteenth-century treatments, whether surgical (purges, blood-letting) or pharmaceutical, had a large span of indications.11 This diversity of indications, however, can be understood in a different perspective: rather than a cure-all, waters were a recurrent resource to cope with enduring, chronic diseases, as Linden himself underlines (“all such Chronic Cases”).
Chronicity and eighteenth-century bodies
- 12 Jean-Pierre Bouchon, “1+2+3 ou comment tenter d’être efficace en gériatrie”, Revue du Praticien, 34 (...)
11I would like to open this topic with an honest detour, one of those personal realisations that happen to help us move forward in our research by taking a little step on the side before coming back to our tried and tested methodological path, with refreshed thoughts and a more acute sight. Perhaps one of the most illuminating tools to apprehend chronicity was shared by a geriatrics doctor I had a casual conversation with. Older people, they said, have a multiplicity of diseases. If you want to cure them, you must take all their other ailments into account, for although dissociated, they are cumulative. Taking care of one of the diseases or symptoms implies anticipating how the treatment might trigger other symptoms in organs which have been weakened by previous ailments and are likely to decompensate. A formula named “1+2+3” helps practitioners remember to look for disease #3 if they want the symptoms associated with disease #1 to disappear.12
- 13 See for example Joël Coste, Alain Leplège, Marie Gaille, and Joël Chandelier. Pathos et Chronos: la (...)
- 14 Roy Porter and George Sebastian Rousseau, Gout: The Patrician Malady, New Haven, Yale University Pr (...)
12Eighteenth-century bodies were confronted to the complexity of multiple chronic ailments at an earlier age.13 Almost every single operation or major illness presently experienced by a twenty-first-century youth would have remained unresolved in a pre-antibiotics, pre-surgical world. Even in the highest social circles, bodies were scarred and sometimes maimed by a vast array of diseases and life accidents – women who had had children are prime examples. Unresolved ailments, which were highly dependent on class but, once again, not altogether resolved by social status – from ongoing syphilis or gonorrhoea to persistent digestive discomforts – created an accumulation of pains and aches. Thus, the practical “1+2+3” guidelines of contemporary geriatrics on cumulative symptoms and diseases, which is itself an unresolved sum, reminds us that most diseases the waters were meant to alleviate affected people who were already suffering from something else. Sometimes, new diseases were integrated to the patient’s understanding of their own pre-existent disease, either as a new symptom or as a new stage. Such was the case of the internal gout, which affected internal organs when it could not be expelled through the toe.14
13In this perspective, “healing” takes a different meaning, more pragmatic than the initial idea of a return to sound health, since return to a previous state of health did not necessarily mean that it would be a sound one, due to other illnesses. The multiple forms of relief brought by eighteenth-century medicines thus shed a new light on the actual effects of purging, bleeding, poultices and ointments, and, incidentally, on taking the waters.
14Later eighteenth-century doctors recorded a plethora of complex cases in patients who came to take the waters, and a closer look at one of them will be helpful to understand what degree of cure and relief could be provided and expected by doctors, patients and their friends. One of the most comprehensive collections of such cases can be found in the works of John Rutty, a Quaker doctor working in Ireland who wrote an exhaustive account of British and Irish mineral waters in 1757, A Methodical Synopsis of Mineral Waters. Rutty was very thorough in his research on mineral waters, and his treatise is especially well documented on the smaller spas of Ireland. He describes the waters of Swandlinbar, in County Cavan, situated near the twenty-first-century frontier between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland:
AD. 1743, a poor man, aged forty, had long laboured under the following complaints: a discharge of blood by urine, as also of a matter, resembling curds, or hardened slime, which last was constantly voided with his urine, which had a fetid smell, like that of onions; he had a very frequent irritation to make water night and day, not being able to retain above two ounces at a time: with-all, he had sometimes a prickling pain about the beginning of the bulbus urethrea.
- 15 John Rutty, A Methodical Synopsis of Mineral Waters, London, W. Johnston, 1757, p. 539.
Under these circumstances, having tried many medicines to no purpose, he went to this fountain this summer, and drank six quarts of the water in a day, and was sometimes purged with Glauber's salt; but, by reason of his poverty, was not able to stay there above six weeks; and, indeed, whilst he was there, he scarce found any sensible relief, the discharge, at least of blood, continuing as before; but, since his return home, the discharge of blood entirely ceased for many months; from whence, being convinced of the healing virtue of these waters, he, the following summer, returned to them, having then partly the same discharge as before, except that he voided less blood. He was then advised by his physicians to spend the whole summer there, as the least he could do to effect a compleat cure of this stubborn disorder; but, unfortunately again for himself, he stayed there only five weeks, drank a gallon [almost half a litre] of the water in a day, and sometimes took a dose of the purging salts: however, in the space of three weeks his urine became entirely clear, and void of the matter above described. It is true, the frequent irritation to make water returned on him some weeks after his leaving the waters, as also the discharge of the matter above described, although not in above half the quantity he had usually voided before, and he could retain three or four ounces of urine at a time. At the well he voided a large clot of blood, having otherwise of late been entirely free from any discharge of blood. I saw him walking the streets of Dublin frequently, ten years after, though not yet free from his disorder; it seems, however, highly probable, that had he spent two whole summers at the waters, from the beginning of his complaints, his cure might have been compleated.15
15Both the case depicted and the language in which it is depicted provide insight into ways in which healing was framed both socially and culturally. Socially first, as the sick person is poor, yet his poverty is not presented as part of the sickness, unlike concurring medical discourses at the same time, but as a hindrance to get proper treatment. He cannot afford a full water course even though he could afford many medicines, or perhaps they had been given to him for free, as physicians were supposed to cure the sick poor with no fee. This goes against the idea that spa treatment would have been kept for an elite, or that the poor would have no expectation for a cure. Secondly, healing is only applied to the “healing virtue” of the waters, that is to say an absolute virtue independent of each particular case and to a potential “compleat cure” if enough time had been allotted to the cure. Once the case is considered, other expressions are used: the disappointed expectation of “any sensible relief,” the ability of walking again “though not yet free from his disorder.” The cure is sincerely hoped for, but remains a hardly attainable goal, both financially and physically. Still, the poor man can walk, which makes the waters of Swandlibar efficient and promising. In the discourse of a medical doctor dedicated to spread the use of mineral waters, healing is here accepted both as pragmatic relief for a “stubborn disorder,” a good definition of chronicity, as well as the theoretical horizon of expectations for the course of the waters.
16Chronicity and overlapping medical conditions made “relief” a reasonable goal to achieve, sometimes equivalent to a cure. The alleviation of pain and of symptoms was an end in itself, as shown by other proto-medical sources, which would have targeted a much wider, less instructed audience than Rutty’s scientific survey of spas. In an advertisement for the new spa of Battle Bridge Wells published in Lloyd’s Evening Post in 1761, the advertisers, promoting the little spa in the North of London, close to Bagnigge Wells, preferred the promise of “great relief” rather than unattainable wondrous cures:
Battle Bridge Wells Purging Waters, the Bottom of Gray’s Inn Lane Road, on the New Road leading from Islington to Tottenham Court, next to a House called the Ivy House, are now in the greatest Perfection, one Pint being fully sufficient for most Constitutions, without Salts; these Waters are allowed to be the best in England, by the many Thousands of Persons that have drank them within this Month, many of which have already found great Relief in many difficult Cases; The Gardens, and Coffee and Tea Rooms, are commodious for the genteelest of Company; they may be drank every Morning as soon as Day Light, and 3d. each Person; or delivered at the Pump Room, at 8d. per Gallon.
- 16 Lloyd’s Evening Post, London, issue 559, 1761.
NB: Do not mistake this Place for one called Bagnigge Wells, at Black Mary’s Hole, for great Numbers have so done.16
Mineral waters as drugs
- 17 Philip Rieder and François Zanetti, Materia medica: savoirs et usages des médicaments aux époques m (...)
17Mineral waters were part of the pharmacopeia of eighteenth-century physicians: just like mercury, senna grains and laudanum, they were one of the potential remedies to be prescribed by physicians or advised by surgeons. In their extensive study on the history of drugs in modern Europe, François Zanetti and Philip Rieder remind us of the five-step process of drug treatment described by the anthropologist Van der Geest et al., which could partly be applied to mineral waters: prescription, fabrication, distribution, use, and efficiency.17
- 18 Diatribes against self-prescription were nothing new, as Marylin Nicoud argues, fourteenth-century (...)
18To a certain extent, taking the waters did involve this five-step process, starting with prescription. Mineral waters could be prescribed by medical doctors, who often advised to prepare the body by “gentle purges,” light diet, and exercise. They were prescribed according to a specific posology: patients had to drink, bathe or receive local application by showers or poultices according to a specific schedule, and a specific, often gradual dosage. The particulars of prescription – dosage, schedule for intake, preparation of the bodies – were partly inherited from humoral medicine, some would also argue astrology, and partly devised to fit the constraints of spa visits. They helped to frame – if not stage – the cure, giving an array of particular directions that could highly impact the final result. In other words, if the treatment was inefficient, it might have been because you did not follow the minute particulars of the prescription. In any case, medical doctors kept insisting on the necessity of prescription, appalled by the recurrent self-prescription of ignorant patients. The poor, for example, were often given to excessive drinking in the nearby spas and the results – often excessive purging – could be debilitating.18
- 19 Noel G. Coley, “Physicians and the Chemical Analysis of Mineral Waters in Eighteenth-Century Englan (...)
- 20 Noel G. Coley, “The Preparation and Uses of Artificial Mineral Waters (ca. 1680–1825)”, Ambix, 31, (...)
19The second step, fabrication, might seem less applicable in the context of mineral waters. And yet, although most waters were already fabricated, they had to have been evaluated beforehand: the question of the evaluation of the remedy was greatly discussed through the analysis of its chemical composition. They could be presented to the Royal Society or become the object of a medical treatise.19 As aforementioned, waters were organised by category, from chalybeate to calcareous. Their action was also categorised as a purge, a solvent or a fortifying remedy, according to the components. In reality, each analysis insisted on the idiosyncratic aspect of each water. Rutty graphically presents this in various tables comparing the compositions of mineral waters, in which each cell evaluates the presence of the mineral component with experiments and results (figure 3). Thinking of fabrication in the context of mineral waters is also relevant because the enhancement or mitigation of some of the aggressive elements was often recommended: waters were mixed with herbs or glauber salt. Some waters were even entirely fabricated in eighteenth-century London and Paris, where artificial mineral waters could be had in shops: one might take a Plombières shower in London before getting a chance to travel to the Vosges.20
- 21 Sylvia Mcintyre, “The Mineral Water Trade in the Eighteenth Century”, The Journal of Transport Hist (...)
- 22 Armel Cornu, “Enlightening Water: Science, Market and Regulation of Mineral Waters in Eighteenth-Ce (...)
- 23 Hippocrates upon Air: Water, and Situation; upon Epidemical Diseases; and upon Prognosticks, in Acu (...)
20The third step, distribution, which is necessary for drugs to be available on the market, also applies to mineral waters. Both artificial waters and mineral waters could be delivered at home, in bottles, with a rather active trade of water bottles.21 In a recent study on the use of artificial waters in France, Armel Cornu has shown the extent of the phenomenon and analysed the distribution of waters in water bureaux, with inventories of prices.22 Nonetheless, medical doctors insisted on the benefits of taking the waters directly at the spa for various reasons. Chemistry was the most important one: the “volatile spirits,” i. e. gas and other subtle components that would quickly evaporate could dissolve in the process, weakening the effects of the waters. Another argument was the impact of the environment on ill health: these ideas were rooted in the neo-Hippocratic revival of the early eighteenth century, especially the commented editions of Hippocrates’ Air Water, Places, which emphasised the role of the air and environment on health and cultures.23 As mentioned earlier, medical doctors also encouraged the great benefits of the exercise provided by travelling to the spa, on the one hand, and of daily excursions to the pump-room or in the surrounding parks, on the other. Spas were an opportunity for movement within the circles of sociability, as one of the most famous and controversial water-doctors, Diedel Frederick Linden, advised:
- 24 Diederick Wessel Linden, A Treatise on the Three Medicinal Mineral Waters at Llandrindod, London, J (...)
After Dinner, the Patient may exercise Abroad, provided the Air be dry and warm; otherwise, he must find himself Exercise within Doors. Dancing is to be preferred before any other, as the most salutary: But then I must caution not to use it to Excess, nor to that degree, as to promote Sweating. The Night-air must be avoided, as too cool; Finally, let him go warm to Bed.24
21Linden’s advice taps into the Galenic preventative tradition of the “non-naturals,” which included a good management of the passions. The various forms of entertainment provided at the spa would thus help raise the spirits, sometimes literally, and alleviate the passions of the soul.
- 25 See Vasset, Murky Waters, op. cit., p. 47-82.
- 26 Elizabeth Robinson Montagu, The Letters of Mrs Elizabeth Montagu: With Some of the Letters of Her C (...)
22Finally, Van der Geest et al.’s last step is a straightforward approach of the question of efficiency, often neglected because most pre-twentieth-century treatments have been disregarded as inefficient at best, toxic at worst. Because of the fear of adopting a retrospective approach to eighteenth-century health and disease, the question of efficiency has often been avoided in the history of medicine. It can, however, be addressed within historical frames and the understanding that healing was relative. Did mineral waters “work,” then? Such is the most recurrent question a researcher faces, which perhaps should not be discarded in the name of historicity. I have argued elsewhere that they were certainly perceived as efficient by patients themselves.25 In letters, patients advise each other, as is the case of the Bluestockings activist and letter-writer Elizabeth Robinson Montagu who warmly encouraged her friend Anne Donnellan to go to Tunbridge Wells as “the air of the place is excellent” and the waters so beneficial that she declared: “I believe I owe my life to their assistance.”26
23Beyond such dramatic accounts of healing, the notion of relief was a major argument for efficiency. Relief itself was not necessarily devoid of pain; sometimes treatments were considered to work if they triggered the expected effects. The fact that saline waters actually purged, for example, made them efficient in the perceptions of doctors and patients alike. The long-held belief and observation that each patient was different and, as a result, would respond differently to the water treatment according to the time, place, and composition of the water shaped expectations from patients and observations from doctors. In other words, the experience of healing was framed by experience, culture, and medical theory. As we have seen, some retrospective accounts of healing could be extremely assertive and consolatory, others were much more circumspect on the water course they had taken or were about to take.
Managing uncertainty: from medical waters to miracle waters
- 27 Some doctors like Sir John Floyer explicitly compared immersion in cold water to early modes of bap (...)
24The material quality of mineral waters made the experience, organisation and providing of the treatment different from any other treatment. The full immersion of the body in bathing27 engaged the patient in the curing process, which, far from our contemporary ideas of spas, was often very demanding. As for drinking, any person who tried the mineral waters of the “Source de l’Hôpital” in Vichy or the sulphurous waters of Harrogate will know that the very act of drinking, before purging even starts, can be a trying experience. Together with the reiteration of the treatment and the exercise needed to reach the spa, mineral waters offered an immersive bodily experience that required more than consent. It demanded true commitment from the patient. Thus, the uncertainty of the outcome might have been a rather powerful deterrent on top of the burdening treatment, which some patients could not stand.
25Eighteenth-century treatments were always a risk: in fact, medical doctors themselves were eager to remind their readers of the potential dangers of excessive drinking and unmonitored bathing. This sense of risk implied that mineral waters were effective – their harming potential was the flip side of the curing coin. Less spectacular, perhaps, a greater risk for patients was that the treatment could do nothing at all, or worse yet, aggravate some of the symptoms.
26Risk and uncertainty were addressed differently by a diversity of agents. In medicine, the questions of measurement and evaluation were at the heart of a physician’s or a chemist’s practice. At stake was also to keep the threat of quackery at bay, as mineral waters were recurrently seen as a cure-all. Finally, the long-winded history of mineral waters and their religious inheritance were another element in the management of uncertainty.
- 28 On the overlapping rhetorics of medicine and quackery, see M. A. Katritzky, Women, Medicine and The (...)
- 29 Tobias Smollett, An Essay on the External Use of Water, London, M. Cooper, 1752.
27One of the recurrent motives of uncertainty amongst eighteenth-century patients and doctors was the threat of quackery.28 For doctors, quackery was a protean menace which threatened the boundaries of medical knowledge. Like many other eighteenth-century remedies, mineral waters could be depicted as panacea, from Smollett’s targeted attack on the “external use of water” – that is to say bathing in the waters of Bath, which he compares to the ancient practice of touching for the King’s Evil – to multiple representations of mineral waters as a cure for barrenness in popular culture.29 The threat of quackery was a favourite trope of contemporary satire, as illustrated by the following broadside poem that circulated during the Restoration, when Islington was rising in reputation. The anonymous satirical narrator of the poem A Morning Ramble, or Islington Wells Burlesqt [sic] meets a “Quack in Plush array’d,” boasting the virtues of Islington waters:
- 30 A Mornings Ramble, or, Islington Wells Burlesq’t, London, G. Croom, 1684, p. 4.
If Barren Womb does want specific,
To make her Fruitful and Prolifick,
These Waters will effect the Cure
In nine Months time you may besure.
They ease the Gout and also Claps,
Beyond the danger of Relaps.
People may talk of Epsom Wells,
Or Tunbridge Springs which most Excells,
I’le tell you by my ten year practice
Plainly what the matter of fact is.30
28The poem imports the stock character of the quack doctor found in so many early modern popular comedies and satires to debunk the waters as a cure-all. In fact, the quack is as much a literary figure in comedy as it is a trope of medical treatises. It works as a catalyst for all the cultural anxieties induced by the uncertainty of the curing process, the practice of charging for care, and the sense of an array of conflicts of interests that were – and are – structural to the medical practice.
29Uncertainty, finally, is to be reframed in a religious system of beliefs and representations. One could expect that in eighteenth-century Britain, in a culture largely dominated by Protestantism on the one hand, and the rationality of the Enlightenment on the other, miracle cures were not regarded as medical. Phyllis Hembry’s analysis of the “Elizabethan transformation” of early modern spas shows how medical rhetoric gradually replaced the log of miracles after the Reformation, which “entailed the closure of many holy wells” and the secular reinvention of famous healing waters such as Buxton. The culture of mineral waters, which was inherited from the long-lasting Roman Catholic culture of thaumaturgic waters persisted well into the eighteenth century, however. Some representations of mineral waters kept a miraculous rhetoric, both in medicine and in popular culture.
- 31 “Holy wells,” Alexandra Walsham writes, “were places to which committed Catholics of both humble an (...)
30The most obvious cases of miraculous rhetoric were the holy wells: some of them were still in use, such as St Winifred in Wales or St Chad in London, some of them re-emerging in the backyards of the suburbs of London, such as Sadler’s Wells. Some wells, such as Glastonbury, were the object of medical and religious controversies, others were simply integrated within a system of belief which has been described by religious historians as “protestant magic.” Both Protestants and Catholics visited the holy wells, and incorporated the idea of miraculous waters to pre-existing systems of representations.31 In other words, relationships to healing were not monolithic and could integrate overlapping theoretical systems.
- 32 See Jacalyn Duffin, Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints, and Healing in the Modern World, Oxford, Oxf (...)
- 33 Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England, op. cit., p. 4-5.
31Reversely, the presence of the supernatural was not limited to religious rituals. Miracle cures were part of eighteenth-century treatises on waters. I initially treated miraculous cases as fiction or promotional material, but earlier studies have shown that there was room for the rhetoric of miracles in eighteenth-century medical, philosophical and religious thought.32 In her book Miracles in the Enlightenment, Jane Shaw examines the Protestant debates around contemporary miracles, and their theological and cultural implications. Perceptions of miracles in eighteenth-century Britain were far from monolithic. Some Quakers, she explains, claimed that they experienced divine healing while, at the other end of the Protestant spectrum, some Anglican theologians stood firmly on the “cessatum,” that is to say the belief that miracles had ceased with biblical times.33 The “miraculous” cures I am dealing with in the context of eighteenth-century spas are not strictly theological, and would not have been included at any stage in the Protestant debates around miracles. Rather, they belong to what Jane Shaw calls “an appetite for wonders,” a broader approach to extraordinary cases and unexplainable cures. Rutty’s comparative treatise is a case in point, with a dramatic account of the effects of Athlone waters in his native country of Ireland. John Rutty, who happened to be a Quaker, did not care for the thaumaturgic qualities of the mineral waters, and focused intensely on their chemical components. After describing his various experiments on the Athlone waters in Roscomond County, he gives a list of various cures effected by the waters since 1747:
- 34 Rutty, A Methodical Synopsis, op. cit., p. 360.
It has proved effectual in many instances in the cure of stubborn bloody fluxes, particularly in one of eight months standing in a woman aged sixty-five, who was perfectly cured on five days drinking of this water.
Sometimes with the salts, but oftener without them.
A second person, greatly emaciated by a dysentery of nine months standing, was cured by drinking there waters eighteen days.
A third in the same disease of above two years standing was greatly relieved; and a fourth was cured of the same disease of four years standing by drinking these waters.
N. B. These effects are far from incredible, these waters, in common with other chalybeates, being possessed of qualities intitling [sic.] them thereto, viz. diluting the acrid juices, and-corroborating the relaxed parts, whilst they divert the humours by urine; and accordingly the Pyrmont water, and several other chalybeates, are eminent in this case; and, that there good effects are not peculiar to this water, will appear in the next section on the water of Kilroran; and, moreover, we are assured by the belt authors on the scurvy, that inveterate scorbutic diarrhoeas and dysenteries are cured or helped by chalybeate waters.34
32Rutty’s note on the quality of the waters is a way of incorporating the rhetoric of the “incredible” – usually restricted to miracles – into scientific reasoning. He juxtaposes humoral medicine, chemistry, and the theory of relaxed or tense fibres with experience and observation (the waters of Pyrmont and other chalybeates), and information from his peers. He maintains a dual discourse, one relying on sudden cure of resistant diseases dispatched as a last chance remedy, the other juxtaposing several medical frames of thoughts to give a medical account of extraordinary cures.
33In the nineteenth century, with the development of medical balneology, water cures would expand throughout Europe along with sanatoriums and climatic resorts, emphasising even more the role of time and place in the curing process. Eighteenth-century patients who took mineral waters, whether internally or externally, did not seem to remain indifferent to the cure: letters, fiction and case-studies show them either complaining about the discomfort of the cure or witnessing its efficiency. Further study remains to be done to retrace the individual experience of a water course for those who were not literate in medical knowledge, and more generally the less educated. Similarly, the question of efficiency, at the heart of the notion of treatment, must be reevaluated for eighteenth-century medicine. One may wonder how the efficiency of therapeutics was measured and evaluated in the medical world and more broadly by patients themselves, and their families.
Notes
1 Colin Jones, Charity and Bienfaisance: The Treatment of the Poor in the Montpellier Region, 1740-1815, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 11.
2 Samuel Cuisinier-Delorme and Sophie Chiari’s volume on spa culture gives an interesting insight into the great variety of spas and their literary representations in early-modern England: Sophie Chiari and Samuel Cuisinier-Delorme (eds.), Spa Culture and Literature in England, 1500-1800, coll. Early Modern Literature in History, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.
3 See the introduction and Appendix in my book, Murky Waters: British Spas in Eighteenth-Century Medicine and Literature, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2022.
4 See for example Christopher Hamlin, “Chemistry, Medicine, and the Legitimization of English Spas, 1740-1840”, Medical History. Supplement, 10, 1990, p. 67-81 or David Harley, “A Sword in a Madman’s Hand: Professional Opposition to Popular Consumption in the Waters Literature of Southern England and the Midlands, 1570-1870”, Medical History. Supplement, 10, 1990, p. 48-55.
5 Hamlin, “Chemistry, Medicine, and the Legitimization of English Spas, 1740-1840”, op. cit., p. 69.
6 Ibid., p. 72-73. Hamlin refers to T. Bergman, “On the Preparation of Cold Medicated Waters,” Physical and chemical essays, trans. E. Cullen, London, John Murray, 1784, vol. 1, p. 263-74, and Friedrich Hoffman, New Experiments and Observations upon Mineral Waters, London, printed for J. Osborn and T. Longman, 1731.
7 Alexandra Walsham, “Reforming The Waters: Holy Wells and Healing Springs in Protestant England”, Studies in Church History Subsidia, 12, 1999, p. 227-255.
8 The results of a quantitative search on the Eighteenth Century Collection Online database reveals ninety-one monographs for “water cure,” most of them medical and geographic treatises on mineral waters.
9 See Susannah Lyon-Whaley, “Hot Waters, Cold Waters, and Green Spaces”, Histoire, Médecine et Santé, 24, 2023, p. 41-57.
10 Diederick Wessel Linden, A treatise on the three medicinal mineral waters at Llandrindod, in Radnorshire, South Wales: with some remarks on mineral and fossil mixtures, in their native veins and beds; at least as far as respects their influence on water, London, J. Everingham, 1756, p. 59-60.
11 Vasset, “A Cure All ?” in Murky Waters, op. cit., p. 92-102.
12 Jean-Pierre Bouchon, “1+2+3 ou comment tenter d’être efficace en gériatrie”, Revue du Praticien, 34, 1984, p. 888-892. I would like to thank Doctor Dominique Zamponi for this reference.
13 See for example Joël Coste, Alain Leplège, Marie Gaille, and Joël Chandelier. Pathos et Chronos: la pensée à l’épreuve de la maladie chronique, Paris, Hermann, 2018.
14 Roy Porter and George Sebastian Rousseau, Gout: The Patrician Malady, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998.
15 John Rutty, A Methodical Synopsis of Mineral Waters, London, W. Johnston, 1757, p. 539.
16 Lloyd’s Evening Post, London, issue 559, 1761.
17 Philip Rieder and François Zanetti, Materia medica: savoirs et usages des médicaments aux époques médiévales et modernes, Genève, Droz, 2018; Sjaak van der Geest, Susan Reynolds Whyte, and Anita Hardon, “The Anthropology of Pharmaceuticals: A Biographical Approach”, Annual Review of Anthropology, 25, 1996, p. 153-178, here p. 156-157.
18 Diatribes against self-prescription were nothing new, as Marylin Nicoud argues, fourteenth-century medical doctors argued against self-prescription in medieval Italian spas. See Marylin Nicoud, “Les médecins italiens et le bain thermal à la fin du Moyen Âge”, Médiévales, 21, 43, 2002, p. 13-40.
19 Noel G. Coley, “Physicians and the Chemical Analysis of Mineral Waters in Eighteenth-Century England”, Medical History, 26, 2, Apr. 1982, p. 123-144, and “‘Cures without Care’: ‘Chymical Physicians’ and Mineral Waters in Seventeenth-Century English Medicine”, Medical History, 23, 2, Apr. 1979, p. 191-214.
20 Noel G. Coley, “The Preparation and Uses of Artificial Mineral Waters (ca. 1680–1825)”, Ambix, 31, 1, March 1984, p. 32-48.
21 Sylvia Mcintyre, “The Mineral Water Trade in the Eighteenth Century”, The Journal of Transport History, 2, 1, Feb. 1973, p. 1-19.
22 Armel Cornu, “Enlightening Water: Science, Market and Regulation of Mineral Waters in Eighteenth-Century France”, Doctoral thesis, University of Uppsala, Sweden, 2022.
23 Hippocrates upon Air: Water, and Situation; upon Epidemical Diseases; and upon Prognosticks, in Acute Cases Especially, ed. Francis Clifton, London, J. Watt, 1734. The notion of volatility is explained and analysed in Hamlin, “Chemistry, Medicine, and the Legitimization of English Spas, 1740-1840”, op. cit., p. 73-75.
24 Diederick Wessel Linden, A Treatise on the Three Medicinal Mineral Waters at Llandrindod, London, J. Everingham and T. Reynolds, 1756, p. 233.
25 See Vasset, Murky Waters, op. cit., p. 47-82.
26 Elizabeth Robinson Montagu, The Letters of Mrs Elizabeth Montagu: With Some of the Letters of Her Correspondents, London, Wells and Lilly, 1825, p. 141, quoted in Vasset, ibid., p. 55.
27 Some doctors like Sir John Floyer explicitly compared immersion in cold water to early modes of baptism. See John Floyer, Psychrolousia: Or, the History of Cold Bathing, London, Smith and Walford, 1706, p. 14-15.
28 On the overlapping rhetorics of medicine and quackery, see M. A. Katritzky, Women, Medicine and Theatre, 1500-1750: Literary Mountebanks and Performing Quacks, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007; Roy Porter, Quacks: Fakers and Charlatans in English Medicine, Stroud, Tempus, 2000.
29 Tobias Smollett, An Essay on the External Use of Water, London, M. Cooper, 1752.
30 A Mornings Ramble, or, Islington Wells Burlesq’t, London, G. Croom, 1684, p. 4.
31 “Holy wells,” Alexandra Walsham writes, “were places to which committed Catholics of both humble and high rank instinctively gravitated in the hope of miraculous cures. Undoubtedly they did attract men and women of a conservative bent who regretted the emergence of the ‘new religion’ and clung stubbornly to old‐fashioned practices whose familiarity was a source of psychological comfort, if not real physical relief,” in “Reforming The Waters”, op. cit., p. 43.
32 See Jacalyn Duffin, Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints, and Healing in the Modern World, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009; Jane Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006.
33 Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England, op. cit., p. 4-5.
34 Rutty, A Methodical Synopsis, op. cit., p. 360.
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Titre | Figure 1: Misss Dumplin, Ducktail and Tittup returned from Watering, Etching, 225x350mm. |
Crédits | Source: British Museum [Creative Commons licence] https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_J-5-141 |
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Titre | Figure 2: John Rutty, Medical Synopsis, 1753. |
Crédits | ©BnF https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb312722637 |
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Sophie Vasset, « Healing waters: Medicine, Chemistry, Relief and Extraordinary Cures in Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century », Études Épistémè [En ligne], 46 | 2024, mis en ligne le 15 mars 2025, consulté le 12 mai 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/20122 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13jup
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