#hydropathy

Glen Haven, and the Staghorn Cliffs

The illnesses most responsive to hydropathy were hypochondriasis and hysteria, conditions thought to stem from a disjunction between the body and the mind. The novelist Dinah Mulock attributed the prevalence of hypochondriasis—another term for the dyspepsia that afflicted Darwin and Edward Lane—to ‘our  present state of high civilisation, where the mind and the body seem cultivated into perpetual warfare one with the other’. The victims were often sensitive, intellectual men; the symptoms could include misanthropy or self-loathing; and the cure, said Miss Mulock, was ‘rest, natural living, and an easy mind’. Hysteria was the female equivalent of this malady. In an influential work of 1853, Robert Brudenell Carter argued that hysteria was a biological disorder caused by emotional trauma: ‘the derangements are much more common in the female than in the male—women not only being prone to the emotions, but also more frequently under the necessity of endeavouring to conceal them’. Miss Mulock identified the illness as part of a general female malaise: ‘I am afraid it cannot be doubted that there is a large average of unhappiness existent among women: not merely unhappiness of circumstances, but unhappiness of soul.’ The cure was a return to nature, she said, aided by the application of water, ‘the colder the better’: ‘some predominant idea…otherwise runs in and out of the chambers of the brain like a haunting devil, at last growing into the monomania’.

Hydropathy, which was introduced to Scotland and England in the 1840s, was  becoming a popular treatment for the vague, anxiety-related sicknesses of the mid-nineteenth century. Invalids had long ‘taken the waters’ at spas such as Bath and Buxton, but the new version of the water cure, invented in Silesia by Vincent Priessnitz in the 1830s, aspired to be more scientific and systematic. The theory was that  immersion in hot and cold baths and showers could restore health to an unbalanced body....Though popular among the intellectual classes, hydropathy was ridiculed in the mainstream press as faddish, comical and self-indulgent.