Chemistry, medicine, and the legitimization of English spas, 1740–1840

Abstract

In 1951 William Addison began his history of the English spa by noting that the vast literature on the medical and chemical properties of mineral waters "would as effectively defy analysis as the waters themselves, apparently, invite it" .'Addison, like most later historians, chose to see the spa mainly as a phenomenon of social history, of changes in manners, morals, and amusements.2Yet our neglect of those thousands of often lengthy and passionate medical and chemical treatises and pamphlets is surely unwise.3It has left us with the impression that the success of a spa was a function of the company one found there, and that this company was utterly frivolous, little concerned with health, or disease, or with the contents of the waters, and glad to throw money at quacks whose inordinate claims and bizarre theories provided the pretence for the spa in the first place.However well this perspective reinforces stereotypes of a Georgian world of rumpled and ruddy country squires and powdered and worldly-wise ladies, it does little to help us take such people seriously, and we are left with more questions than answers.We have no raison d'e'tre for those many works claiming and explaining the properties of mineral waters, though in some behind-the-scenes manner those works probably vitally affected the fortunes of every spa.We have little notion of what taking the waters meant in an age in which self-diagnosis and self-treatment were far more widely accepted than they currently are and in which the bio-chemical reductionism of modern medicine had not yet become established.4We may well be misunderstanding the role of the medical practitioner, and the relations between doctor and patient, for if the accounts of the pompous spa doctors are correct, their

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