Marketplace of the Marvelous (14 page)

The Fowlers remained dedicated to phrenology for the rest of their lives, and continued to live colorful lives despite phrenology's declining status. Orson Fowler continued to offer phrenological exams but left the family business in the 1850s to concentrate on publishing and on promoting radical reforms in the areas of marriage, parenting, and sex. His publications on sex shattered his reputation in the straitlaced Victorian era, and he died in relative obscurity in 1887. Lorenzo and Lydia Fowler moved to England in 1863 and opened a branch of their firm on London's Fleet Street, near Ludgate Circus, bringing phrenology back to the home country of their mentor, George Combe. The Fowler Phrenological Institute flourished abroad, offering classes on phrenology, displaying casts and busts, and selling publications. Their lectures led to the creation of new phrenological societies just like those that tours by Spurzheim and Combe had inspired decades earlier. Lorenzo founded the British Phrenological Society, the last organization to form in the movement, in 1886, and it continued to meet
and promote phrenological ideas, with only limited interruptions, until 1967.
⁷⁹
Never ones to stand on the sidelines, the Fowlers also advocated for other forms of healing, entranced by the ever-flowing stream of exciting new medical theories. In the late 1840s, they added the official periodical of hydropathy, the
Water-Cure Journal
, to their stable of publications. They believed that hydropathy was destined to “not only surpass, but to swallow up or
wash away
, every other medical system now existing among men,” releasing humanity from its dependence on the “drugopathic system.”
⁸⁰

The water cure advised patients to take water in a variety of ways, from steam baths and full tubs to showers and foot and sitz baths. Each application served a specific purpose in the hydropathic regimen and was specially prescribed depending on the patient's particular ailment and her ability to endure treatment. (
Anatomical and Medical Illustrations
, ed. Jim Harter, Dover Publications, 1991)

 

Announcing the November 1850 birth of his daughter in the pages of the
Water-Cure Journal
, Thomas Nichols declared that childbirth could be both easy and nearly pain free for women. His wasn't the smug and unknowing opinion of a man standing idly by while his wife labored for hours in another room. His wife, in fact, fully agreed with him.

Mary Gove Nichols achieved her miraculous birth with a strict daily regimen. She avoided alcohol, caffeine, dirt, and all medicines. She exercised regularly, ate healthy foods, wore comfortable clothes, and took daily baths in cold water—and it hadn't worked just for her. As a midwife to others, Mary described the pain experienced by women under her care as “slight” and not the “pangs worse than those of death” experienced by most women. Throughout her own pregnancy, Mary published reams of advice on how to achieve pain-free childbirth that were hardly a guarantee, much less a panacea, despite her devotion.

Mary's secret was hydropathy, a system of healing that relied on the power of cold, pure water. Both husband and wife knew that water produced healthy pregnancies from Mary's own experience. She'd suffered the agony of four successive stillbirths before submitting to its rigorous but healthful routine. The efficacy of the water cure for pregnancy and childbirth “comes so near the miraculous, that I hardly expect to be believed,” wrote Thomas.
¹
But believe people did, especially since the advice came from the Nicholses, who went on
to become two of the most influential and authoritative advocates of hydropathy in the nation.

Today, when it seems that most Americans carry a water bottle to drink their eight daily glasses, the importance of water to health seems obvious. But for hydropaths, water was more than just a sugar-and calorie-free drink: it was a social good able to cure nearly every disease as well as the social and cultural ills that threatened the health and stability of society. Drinking was not the only way to enjoy water's munificence, though; water was also to be experienced through elaborate rituals of bathing, showering, soaking, sweating, and wrapping. This diversity of baths, not to mention the idea of bathing itself, was highly unusual for most Americans. In 1835, a letter from a reader in the
Boston Moral Reformer
asked, “I have been in the habit during the past winter of taking a warm bath every three weeks. Is this too often to follow the year round?”
²
Hydropathy was not a medical system in the traditional sense of a doctor administering treatment to a sick patient. Instead, it functioned more as a water-based lifestyle plan with a vision of radically transforming the world through personal health achieved through nature's purest substance.

Hydropathy grew out of the observations and experiments of Vincent Priessnitz. A peasant born in 1799 on a farm in Silesian Austria, located in today's Czech Republic, Priessnitz noticed as a child how cold-water compresses could ease the pain of sprains and bruises. Water's potential as a cure-all revealed itself to him after an 1816 farm accident. One day while he was baling hay, a runaway horse and wagon trampled the teenaged Priessnitz, leaving him with several broken ribs and a bruised left arm. The doctor from a nearby town told him that the severity of his injuries made it unlikely he'd ever work again. Priessnitz, however, refused to accept this prognosis.
³

Priessnitz began testing the power of water to ease what drugs and heroic therapies could not. He wrapped himself in wet cloths and ate very little while consuming large quantities of cold water. To reset his broken ribs, he pressed his abdomen against a chair and inhaled deeply, allowing the expansion of his chest to push his ribs back into place. Priessnitz eventually recovered from his injuries, and the success of his self-cure led him to broaden his investigation into the curing power of water. Similar to those of his irregular healing brethren, his story of discovery became an integral part of his developing
system, a “personal revelation” about the failure of regular medicine and an awakening to the possibilities of a cold-water cure.
⁴

As word of Priessnitz's success spread throughout his village, others came seeking his council. Priessnitz treated people with water internally and externally. He soon gained a notable reputation for his achievements. To care for all who came to him for help, Priessnitz opened the Grafenberg Water Cure, sometimes referred to as “Water University,” in the mountains of Silesia in 1826. By 1829, he had perfected his method of water-based healing.
⁵

Priessnitz treated patients with water in three ways: externally, by bath or shower; locally on certain parts of the body, through washing and soaking; and internally, through drinking or enemas. Nearly as important as the water, he stressed the importance of the doctor-patient relationship, and how clear communication and human touch contributed to wellness.

It's not clear if Priessnitz actually understood how his system worked. He made hazy reference to cold water's ability to relieve inflammation and to restore healthy fluids lost by disease. But mostly he fell back on perhaps the most intuitive and basic explanation for its efficacy based on his observations: water dissolved disease particles and carried them to the skin, where they could be washed away. Priessnitz believed that sickness resulted from some kind of contamination in the body that he called morbid matter, an idea common among both regular and irregular medical practitioners. Bleeding, vomiting, and drugging, the tools regular medicine used to eliminate disease, only weakened the body and ruined its natural systems, argued Priessnitz.
⁶
The process of expelling disease in his system caused a “crisis” in the body that produced visible results such as boils, rashes, diarrhea, sores, and sweating. All were signs that the treatment was working. Priessnitz prescribed cold baths, cold showers, cold compresses, and wet bandaging or blanketing to cleanse and open the pores, aid circulation, and invigorate the skin as it drew putrid matter out of the body. As if that wasn't enough water, he also ordered patients to drink a minimum of ten to twelve glasses of cold water per day. Taking Priessnitz perhaps a bit too literally, English doctor James Wilson claimed to have drunk thirty glasses of water before breakfast each day of the eight months he spent at Grafenberg.
⁷
He also took nearly one thousand baths and spent 480 combined hours wrapped in wet sheets during his stay.
⁸

The idea of therapeutic bathing wasn't new. Humans have soaked in communal baths and natural mineral springs since antiquity. The ancient Romans, for instance, took bathing to elaborate heights, constructing ornate baths near mineral springs where the wealthy could “take the waters” while also indulging in other pleasures of the flesh. The Japanese have enjoyed hot springs known as
onsen
for at least a thousand years, and many European explorers noted the bathing rituals and sweat lodges used by some Native Americans in North America. Most of these early bathing practitioners did not attribute the health benefits to the water itself. Instead, the water was thought to have mystical qualities or to contain spirits released by the action of the water. Hydropaths, in contrast, viewed water as the cure in and of itself.
⁹

Priessnitz's method also differed from the spa therapy that had accompanied regular medicine in Europe for centuries. Most noticeably, the waters at Grafenberg had no particular chemical distinction, unlike the famous spas of Bath in England and Karlsbad in Germany, where patients soaked in warm springs and drank the mineral waters. At these spas, water was administered in only two forms—drinking or dipping—and it was always warm and never cold. Regular physicians recommended spa therapy for only a small number of conditions, including rheumatism, gout, and bladder stones. Even at its height in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, spa therapy comprised only a tiny fraction of a doctor's regular practice, and water was never the sole therapeutic agent; water was simply one part of a treatment plan that usually involved the more common heroic therapies of bleeding and purging. Perhaps the biggest difference between spa therapy and hydropathy, though, was the atmosphere. Many people were drawn to the therapies at Bath Spa in England not for medical purposes but to enjoy the dancing, drinking, gambling, and seducing that occurred in and around these popular watering holes. Hydropathy, in contrast, focused almost exclusively on healthful activities, and its patients tended toward the earnest and somber. Merriment and debauchery would only distract them from their goal: the perfection of humanity through individual health.
¹⁰

The medical benefits of cold water were not unknown to regular doctors. Despite the popularity of spas, many physicians criticized the value of warm mineral springs for fighting disease, not to mention the unhygienic conditions that existed inside many of the bathhouses.
These critiques led to countless books on the curative powers of cold water in the eighteenth century with titles like
Psychrolusia, or History of Cold-Bathing
;
The Curiosities of Cold Water
; and
An Essay on the External Use of Water
.
¹¹
John Wesley's popular eighteenth-century medical manual,
Primitive Physick: Or, an Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases
, asserted that cold water could cure nearly every disease if properly administered.
¹²
These ideas were common in the United States, too. Benjamin Rush advocated the use of cold bathing to “wash off impurities from the skin.”
¹³
Even with this attention to the medical benefits of water, cold water played only a small therapeutic role until Priessnitz popularized it as the one and only cure to all disease.

Washing disease away wasn't Priessnitz's only concern, however; he also sought to deny it entry into the body through a healthy lifestyle of diet and exercise. Hydropathy emphasized hygiene and healthy lifestyle choices far more than regular medicine and even more than other irregulars. Priessnitz argued that filth and poor diet gave disease easy access into the body. In
The Hydropathic Encyclopedia
, American hydropath Dr. Russell Trall explained that disease was “produced by bad air, improper light, impure food and drink, excessive or defective alimentation, indolence or over-exertion, [or] unregulated passion.” For Trall, it all boiled down to “unphysiological voluntary habits.”
¹⁴
In other words, sickness resulted from laziness, a lack of exercise, and junk food, the familiar chords of obesity debates to this day.

Believing hot food, like hot water, dangerous, Priessnitz recommended cold foods at mealtimes and a diet free from stimulants such as alcohol, coffee, and tea. He also took the flavor out of most meals by outlawing mustard, pepper, and most spices. Hydropathic food tended toward the coarse and heavy for a sound and fibrous internal cleansing. Priessnitz explained that the way to strengthen a “weakened stomach is to avoid all the causes that have contributed towards destroying its tone.”
¹⁵