Marketplace of the Marvelous (15 page)

Priessnitz also prescribed large amounts of exercise throughout the day. Working out, particularly after cold baths, helped to “stimulate the proper therapeutic reaction.”
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Walking outdoors became the most popular form of exercise, but in bad weather, patients could do gymnastics or even dance indoors. For some conditions, patients lifted weights or jumped rope. Others chopped wood. Women received the same prescriptions for physical activity as men; that women exercised
and were highly encouraged to do so was very unusual at a time when frailty and fainting were prized feminine qualities.
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Priessnitz's water cure in Grafenberg became renowned throughout the Western Hemisphere. Thousands came to take the cure, including many European princes and princesses, barons, and counts. Visitors marveled at Priessnitz's ability to diagnose disease and devise a treatment plan simply by studying the quality and cast of a patient's skin. He never checked the pulse, looked at the tongue, or asked patients about their complaints, the standard methods of disease detection. One patient who made the trip to see Priessnitz was Elizabeth Blackwell. Although not a fan of irregular medicine generally, she came in 1850 seeking relief for an inflamed eye. Diet and exercise strengthened Blackwell's overall health, but her badly inflamed eye never cleared and eventually required removal. Even though his treatment failed Blackwell, Priessnitz's therapy proved effective for most ailments, and by 1840, nearly seventeen hundred patients per year sought treatment at Grafenberg.
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Priessnitz's success spurred countless imitators and admirers. Hydropathic institutes opened in England in the 1840s. Dr. James Wilson, of the thirty glasses of water before breakfast, opened his own water cure called Grafenberg House in Malvern, England, in 1842. Wilson gave each patient a Grafenberg flask so that they, too, could drink a few gallons of water before breakfast. Older health spas at Bath and Brighton refurbished and adopted Priessnitz's now fashionable regimen. These English water cures attracted all kinds of people, including Scottish historian and writer Thomas Carlyle, author Charles Dickens, scientist Charles Darwin, and poet Alfred (Lord) Tennyson. Of these, Darwin was perhaps the most enamored of hydropathy. He returned home from Malvern and constructed an outdoor shower and bath in his garden that he used daily for five years under the ministrations of his butler. He also bought a horse for exercise and limited his work to two and a half hours daily, which he reported renewed his strength.
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Not everyone was so taken with Priessnitz's successes, though. In the mid-1820s, physicians in the neighboring town of Friewaldau brought Priessnitz to court for practicing without a medical license. The court found Priessnitz not guilty, however. Because he used only water and no drugs of any kind, the judge determined that Priessnitz
could not be said to be unlawfully practicing medicine. His acquittal won him and hydropathy even greater renown.
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Hydropaths trumpeted the ability of water to cure—or at the very least alleviate—all manner of acute and debilitating diseases that regular medicine had failed to treat. They emphasized water's ability to cleanse, purify, soothe, cool, relax, renew, and wash away ills. Even with hydropathy's sometimes hyperbolic praise of its power, water both gave and sustained life on earth, so critics struggled to deny its primacy and importance to health. Good health was natural, hydropaths argued, and it was the way God intended people to be. While hydropaths didn't tend to claim spiritual awakening or communion for those who took the cure, they also didn't deny these encounters if they happened to occur when someone was taking the waters.
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The first water cure in the United States opened its doors in 1843, followed by a second the next year. Both were in New York City and were operated by disillusioned regular doctors.
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Even before they opened, Americans had some familiarity with hydropathy. Newspapers and medical journals had carried stories and reports on hydropathy in Europe throughout the 1830s. Medical journals tended to be critical of the practice, pointing out the dangers and shortcomings of a single-remedy system just as they had done with Thomsonism. Some Americans had even visited water cures while traveling in Europe, bringing back firsthand accounts of their experiences. Americans had examples of water cures closer to home, too. Travelers had long raved about the healing merits of Saratoga Springs in New York, White Sulphur Springs in West Virginia, and Hot Springs in Virginia.
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Hydropathy spread quickly throughout the United States, largely due to the efforts of physicians Joel Shew and Russell Thacher Trall. In 1843 Shew abandoned his regular medical practice to open the nation's first hydropathic institute. Tireless in his reform advocacy, Shew owned and operated several water cures over his life, partnered on others, and wrote books and articles extolling the power of water and the significance of the water cure to the history of medicine. Trall, another disaffected regular doctor, opened the country's second water cure in 1844 and transformed hydropathy into an all-inclusive and very American healing philosophy that emphasized self-improvement and reform. Merging his interests in hygiene, food reform, phrenology, temperance, and vegetarianism, Trall crafted a system that left
virtually no aspect of life unregulated, from work to sleep to meals and morals. For patients suffering from mental ailments, including “ungovernable passions” like anxiety, jealousy, and narcissism as well as other ailments like depression and sleepwalking, he recommended “mental medication” of “pleasant, cheerful, and
sensible
company, with a light and easy, yet regular and steady business occupation.” He suggested several options for sleep disturbances, including “Walking the room in a state of entire nudity,” which Trall declared produced “remarkably quiet and refreshing sleep” among some of his patients. Besides disease, he also counseled on the proper age of marriage, claiming that children born of young parents “are more animal and less moral and intellectual than those born nearer the middle period of the life of the parents.” He advised that the best marriages and the best children came from women aged twenty-two to twenty-five who married men between twenty-five and thirty years old.
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Not content to trust his patients to understand his dietary advice, Trall even published a hydropathic cookbook filled with bland, spice-free, mostly vegetarian recipes for whole-grain breads, gruels, and boiled vegetables.
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Trall based his theory on the laws of nature and made his hygienic system, with water as the central element, one that anyone could use, understand, and benefit from.
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Dissatisfied with the speculative nature of Priessnitz's system, some American hydropaths did try to come up with their own theories for how hydropathy worked. Those that had converted to the field from regular medicine used their knowledge of disease and physiology to imagine how various impurities could invade the body. Germs were still decades away from discovery. These hydropaths proposed theories far more complex and sophisticated than those of the peasant Priessnitz to explain how cold water could heal everything: it dissolved morbid accumulations in the system and ejected them through the skin, lungs, bowels, and kidneys; it stimulated stronger action in the capillaries; it invigorated nerves; or maybe it drew blood from a place of excess to a deficient part.
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The water-cure movement spread through word of mouth and patient testimonials, a process fostered in large part by the
Water-Cure Journal and the Herald of Reform
and similar publications. These publications reported hydropathic innovations and dramatically highlighted amazing water-cure successes as well as the horrible failures of regular medicine. The
Water-Cure Journal
enjoyed remarkable
success from its founding in 1845, acquiring more than fifty thousand subscribers by 1850, and surviving, under various names, until 1897.
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Some of that success may be attributable to phrenologists Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, who took over publication of the journal in 1848. Master salesmen but also true believers in both phrenology and hydropathy, the Fowlers occasionally touted the benefits of the water cure in the pages of their other popular periodical, the
American Phrenological Journal
.
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The mixing of these topics invited the criticism of the
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
in 1846, for combining the “false schemes” of hydropathy with the “noble and lofty views which are the characteristics of Mr. Fowler's [phrenological] philosophy.”
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Despite its generally low regard in many regular medical circles, hydropathy became incredibly popular among the American public. Hydropaths claimed their system aided rather than interfered with nature in its fight against disease, a popular position also claimed by Thomson and his botanics. Its natural curing agent and simple theory of disease offered a welcome and comprehensible alternative to the harsh drugs and the inaccessible language of regular medicine. Relying on the application and drinking of pure water rather than special mineral waters also allowed hydropathy to be easily adaptable to home use, which held particular appeal in a nation that expanded faster than it could produce trained doctors of any kind. Perhaps most appealing of all, though, was hydropathy's new concept of healthful living: the promise of personal perfection through the adoption of the water cure. The system's rules for eating, drinking, exercise, and sleeping provided a sense of meaning and order to followers while also giving them the autonomy to treat themselves: it was personal freedom within tightly controlled strictures. Many hydropaths set themselves up as lifestyle coaches, offering advice and answering questions on nearly every aspect of life. Hydropathy's moral earnestness—many followers also advocated for temperance, vegetarianism, and even abolition—appealed strongly to lower- and middle-class Americans looking to improve their social and economic status.
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Hydropaths strongly believed, like many other kinds of nineteenth-century reformers, that improving the habits of the individual would uplift all of American culture if not the whole of humanity. They shared their generation's boundless optimism in human potential and a romantic notion that Americans could achieve greatness through an act of individual will. Unlike other reformers, though, hydropaths avoided organized and formal political involvement. For the hydropaths, the clearest and best path to improvement lay in personal health. They painted a compelling vision of the good life and supplied the entire system by which they believed it could be achieved. “We labor for the Physical Regeneration of the Race, well knowing that only through this can we successfully promote the Intellectual and Moral Elevation of our fellow-men,” proclaimed the
Water-Cure Journal
. “We ask all who have brothers and sisters of the Human Family, to aid in this work, by becoming Co-Workers with us in the great cause of
HUMAN HEALTH
.”
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Hydropathy seemed to promise that if every person followed its method, humans could eliminate not only disease but all human suffering. The harmonious and moral society that would result would allow everyone to create and control his or her own future. Hydropaths were realistic, though. They realized that not every person would achieve their vision of perfection, but they applauded those who strove to reach it anyway.
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At the same time that Shew and Trall expanded hydropathy's
reach and theoretical underpinnings, it was Mary Gove Nichols and her husband, Thomas, who made hydropathy famous, even before they began flaunting the pain-free birth of their daughter. Born in Goffstown, New Hampshire, in 1810, Mary Sargeant Neal was the precocious daughter of a freethinking father who encouraged her active and curious mind. She started school at age two, and by age six, she had read all of Plutarch. After her family moved to Vermont, her formal schooling became more sporadic, but she continued her self-education by reading everything she could get her hands on. As a teenager, she pored over the pages of the books her medical student brother brought home, fascinated by the workings of the human body but perhaps also wondering why she could find so little information on the health of women like herself.

An unhappy marriage in 1831 to Hiram Gove, who disdained her reading and creative writing, helped turn Mary into a champion of women's rights and a prominent health reformer. Trained as a hatter, Hiram lacked the skills to support his family, so Mary taught, sewed, and published stories and poems to sustain them, all the while enduring his contempt of her writing and personal correspondence. Marriage without love made each hour “an eternity of misery,” she wrote. Despite her unhappiness, Hiram refused her a divorce. To ease her mental and physical suffering, Mary defied her husband and turned back to the medical books that had so enthralled her as a child. She discovered Sylvester Graham, an early advocate of dietary reform, vegetarianism, and hygienic reform and determined that women's well-being and happiness depended on the freedom achieved through personal health.
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Excited by her newfound knowledge, Mary wanted to share her message with others. She particularly wanted to tell other women of the salvation that could be found in knowing about and taking charge of their own bodies. Her husband's disapproval of her activities, even as he benefited from the money she earned from her advocacy, only fueled her “burning zeal to save women from the miseries she saw, and from some that she endured.”
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