Marketplace of the Marvelous (16 page)

In 1838, Mary Gove made a name for herself lecturing (a scandal in and of itself for a woman) on the shocking topics of women's health, anatomy, and physiology. Women's health was a topic rarely, if ever, discussed at the time, much less in public. With no women regular doctors, many women ignored their own health problems and endured in silence to avoid being seen by male doctors, which many
deemed improper. An often sickly woman herself, much of it brought on by the stress of her terrible marriage, Mary made it her mission to relieve other women of the crushing burden of physical and mental suffering. Hundreds packed lecture halls to see the thin, dark-haired woman with an open and intelligent face and exuberant brown eyes discuss the healthy female body.
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In the summer of 1845, finally free of her husband after leaving him and returning to her parents' home in 1841, Mary traveled to Brattleboro, Vermont, to investigate the water cure recently opened there by Priessnitz disciple Dr. Robert Wesselhoeft. Hydropathy wasn't new to her; she'd been reading about it and advocating many of its principles in her lectures and writing for several years, but she lacked formal training in its tenets and use. Impressed by what she saw, she began training as a water-cure physician, offering physiology lessons to patients in exchange for her education.

The town of Brattleboro sat on the Connecticut River where it met Whetstone Brook and the West River in southeastern Vermont. Surrounded by mountains, forests, meadows, gorges, and waterfalls, the area offered plenty of outdoor recreational opportunities for patients taking the cure. “A more suitable spot for such an undertaking could not well have been chosen,” proclaimed one patient.
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Although Shew and Trall had opened urban water cures, most institutions operated in rural areas along rivers, streams, and lakes. Hundreds opened around the country in the 1840s and 1850s, some operating only a few months while others lasted more than a century. Most people who went to a water cure suffered from chronic diseases like asthma, dyspepsia, or gout. Visits tended to last one to three months. Nestled in bucolic settings, these facilities sold hydropathy but also the beauty and tranquility of the surroundings as a respite from the ills of a hectic urban life. The Elmira Water Cure in New York boasted of its sweeping hills and woods, “overlooking the entire city, the river and valley of the Chemung, and the hills around, giving miles of the most varied and beautiful scenery. Our elevation gives us dry and bracing air, so necessary in the cure of Catarrah, Throat and Lung diseases, Rheumatism, Neuralgia, and Scrofula.”
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Many of the larger water cures had sleeping quarters, a dining hall, a bathing area, and an exercise hall. To protect women's modesty, most cures had separate bathing facilities for men and women as well as female bath attendants, nurses, and even doctors.
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Water cures often aimed their services at a particular clientele—women, teachers, weary ministers, or people suffering from certain illnesses—but they also serviced a variety of patients who made their choice based on the scenery or attractions offered rather than on medical specifics. Round Hill House in Massachusetts recruited healthy people to come “for a season of recreation from the cares of business, where pure air, pure water, lovely walks and rides, and captivating scenery, may be enjoyed, without ‘stint or measure.'”
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Round Hill was one of any number of water cures attempting to attract those less interested in medical care than in recreation and social opportunities. Mark Twain found his visit to a European cure so pleasant he quipped, “If I hadn't had a disease I would have borrowed one just to have a pretext for going on.”
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Wesselhoeft's Brattleboro Hydropathic Institution was one of the most exclusive and expensive water cures in the United States. Initially welcoming eighteen patients, it eventually grew to accommodate two hundred at a time, among them some of the nation's leading politicians, social reformers, and writers, including President Martin Van Buren and writer Harriet Beecher Stowe. Wesselhoeft had carefully examined several other springs before determining Brattleboro's to be of superior quality and purity for the institution he planned. It also helped that the town was only a one day's journey by train from Boston, New York, and Albany, major population centers that would provide clients to his fledgling business. Located on a quiet street away from Brattleboro's main business district, the institute's main buildings formed a square enclosing a courtyard with an elaborate fountain. Covered verandas offered areas for exercise in bad weather and cool breezes in the summer. Cold running water pumped into the separate buildings for men and women, each equipped with a variety of baths, as well as single and double rooms for sleeping. A “dancing saloon and parlor” connected the men's and women's buildings. Fresh water from springs located in the hills surrounding the town flowed continually into the plunge baths, twenty-five feet long and fifteen feet wide. In the nearby woods, patients found showers, twelve sitz baths (a waist-high bath used to treat lower-body ailments), an eye bath, an ear bath, and a river shower. Further on, a wave bath fed by the flume of a small millpond was located on the high bank of the Whetstone Brook.

Coaches met patients at the Brattleboro train station and brought
them directly to the institute. One week's stay cost eleven dollars in the winter and ten in the summer. The difference in price reflected the hydropathic insistence that cooler temperatures, like cooler water, made for more effective and comfortable cures; “even the severe cold of winter is no real obstacle to [the cure's] continuance.”
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The price didn't include the hefty supply of sheets and other equipment patients were expected to bring. Each patient was instructed to supply at least two large woolen blankets, a feather bed or three comforters, a course linen sheet for cutting into bandages, two course cotton sheets, six towels, and one injection instrument for enemas. Supplies could also be purchased on site. To save money, patients could also stay at a boardinghouse in Brattleboro and use the outdoor baths for the discounted rate of five dollars per week.
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Nonetheless, few Americans could afford the indulgence of a trip to Brattleboro at a time when the average wage of a male factory worker in the 1850s hovered around one dollar daily.
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Water treatment protocols differed from practitioner to practitioner and from patient to patient, but most hydropaths followed the pattern set by Shew's first New York City cure. The wet sheet became the usual and most popular mode of application because it “cools febrile action, excites the action of the skin, equalizes the circulation, removes obstructions, brings out eruptive diseases, controls spasms, and relieves pain like a charm.” While the icy coldness of the fabric could be shocking at first, Thomas Low Nichols described a near immediate “pleasant glow, a calm, and usually a profound sleep” that quickly followed.
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While Priessnitz's original system called for water to be used both internally and externally, most American hydropaths believed that water worked best when applied gradually through the skin. The wet sheet became the standard method of application. First, the attendant would dip a sheet of cotton or linen in cold water and spread it on several thick wool blankets. The patient would then be wound up in the sheet and blankets by the attendant and secured with pins or tape. Once wrapped, patients would shiver and then lie sweating on feather beds for anywhere from twenty-five minutes to several hours depending on the seriousness of the illness. After they worked up a good sweat, the attendant unwrapped them and plunged them in a cold bath followed by a brisk drying. For severely debilitated patients, the wet-sheet treatment could be too much, so an alternative known as the wet dress was used instead. A loose-fitting, nightgown-like
garment, the wet dress allowed patients to dispense with the services of an attendant and to walk comfortably while also soaking up water. Most wet-dress patients also went to bed in the outfit, a damp and presumably clammy night of sleep.
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The wet dress soon found a following outside the water cure as well, influencing the mid-nineteenth-century Bloomer costume for women, the semiofficial dress of women's liberation. The loose gown with wide sleeves and a skirt falling over baggy trousers seemed the perfect outfit for healthy women who sought comfort and freedom from the strictures of standard women's wear. Popular fashion of the time called for tightly laced corsets, layers of petticoats, and floor-length dresses. Some women dragged fifty pounds of clothing around with them, making walking, not to mention breathing, challenging. Female water-cure patients reveled in the freedom of the wet dress, and they often took that freedom one step further and cut their long hair short for easy drying.
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Fed up with their restrictive clothing, many women—along with many progressive men—began advocating for dress reform as one part of a whole package of rights and freedoms for women. Elizabeth Smith introduced her modified-for-street-wear wet dress to the fashion world in 1851 after sharing her new style with her cousin and women's rights leader, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Journalist Amelia Bloomer discovered it when Stanton came for a visit and showed off the new style. Bloomer soon began writing enthusiastically about it in the
Lily
, the nation's first reform newspaper for women. So great was Bloomer's fervor that her name became indelibly linked with the style, though Bloomer and her fellow wearers suffered merciless ridicule for their fashion choice. Bloomer abandoned the style in 1859 but not her desire for more reasonable clothes as she continued to advocate for sensible women's clothing throughout her life.
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The wet sheet and dress were but one tool in an intense regimen of bathing, soaking, walking, and showering. Educator Catharine Beecher was an early and active promoter of hydropathy, and she came to Brattleboro in the summer of 1846 seeking ways to improve her health. Rarely sick as a child, Beecher claimed that it was only once she had to earn a living as a teacher, confined indoors all day, that she suffered her first nervous breakdown.
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Packed into a wet sheet at 4 a.m., Beecher remained wrapped like a waterlogged mummy for hours. As her body heat warmed the sheet, she began to sweat profusely
beneath her tight wrappings. Beecher was then unwrapped and immersed in a cold plunge bath. This morning soak was only the beginning of her day. She was then sent outdoors to walk as far as she could, drinking five or six tumblers of cold water to stay hydrated before and after her exercise. Many patients walked to Cold Spring, a beautiful pure water stream running down from the mountains. Another path meandered from Elliot Street, where the institute was located, past a woolen mill, along shaded roads and trout streams, to Centerville and back. Returning from her walk, Beecher stood under an eighteen-foot-tall cold-water shower for ten minutes. After this she walked and drank some more. At 3 p.m., Beecher sat in a sitz bath filled with cold water for thirty minutes. She then walked and drank again. At 9 p.m., she sat for thirty minutes with her feet resting in a bucket of cold water. Beecher ended her day as it began nearly seventeen hours earlier, wrapped in wet bandages. She repeated this experience every day of her three-month stay. Her experience and those of others she'd observed convinced her that water cures should be “multiplied all over the land, as the safest and surest methods of relieving debilitated constitutions and curing chronic ailments.” “Without exception,” declared Beecher, “
all
are improved in general health, [and] . . . 
none
are injured.”
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Methods varied depending on the nature of the complaint. In 1849, a thirty-two-year-old woman with dark hair, gray eyes, and a ruddy complexion came to Dr. Wesselhoeft seeking relief for dyspepsia (indigestion), back pain, and fatigue. She'd tried everything, from pills, powders, herbs, and teas to Thomsonism with no relief. She estimated she'd been bled at least twenty times. Wesselhoeft examined her and determined that her dyspepsia was long gone, replaced by sickness generated from all of the medicines and treatments she'd tried. He first had her bathe before he wrapped wet bandages around her stomach and abdomen. She drank water and received several enemas. He then wrapped her in a wet sheet until boils appeared, “sure that all would go on well.” The boils healed but the patient only felt worse. The next day, she began to “vomit large quantities of bile and—worms! Yes! This was her disease!” Wesselhoeft instructed her to drink sixteen tumblers of water and an attendant gave her four water enemas daily. She was told to eat nothing but peas, beans, and coarse bread, fiber to help the worms pass through her system. Finally, she endured three days of diarrhea, evacuating most of the worms and
much of her strength in the process. Exhausted and weak from her ordeal, the woman then underwent a rehabilitation process that Wesselhoeft began to “return her to health.” He kept her wrapped in wet bandages, removing them each day as they grew brown and crusty as the disease left her body. More than a month later, the woman claimed her health at long last restored.
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Intestinal worms can cause vomiting and diarrhea, though it's unlikely that this woman actually vomited worms. Most intestinal parasites come from contaminated food or water or from contact with larva-infested soil. Fibrous foods can help them pass out of the body through the bowels, so Wesselhoeft's treatment may have aided this patient's natural body process of eliminating the worms. Hydropathy's hygiene regimen perhaps helped to prevent reinfection and rehabilitated her with whole foods and water.

Wesselhoeft taught his students, Mary Gove among them, the art of individual prescription, adapting cures to each patient's symptoms, stamina, and age. “The same treatment that would cure one might fail entirely with another,” she later noted.
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Hydropathy was very physical work for the physicians and attendants, too, requiring great strength to rub patients, lift blankets drenched with water, and to assist people in getting in and out of their beds, baths, and wraps. Mary left Brattleboro with a profound respect for the healing power of pure, cold water to cure nearly all disease given the appropriate skill, time, and dedication.
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