At Home - Bill Bryson [189]
The most celebrated pioneer of water cures was Dr. Richard Russell, who in 1750 wrote, in Latin, a book on the curative properties of seawater, translated four years later as A Dissertation Concerning the Use of Sea-Water in Diseases of the Glands. Russell’s book recommended seawater as an efficacious treatment for any number of disorders, from gout and rheumatism to congestion of the brain. Sufferers had not only to immerse themselves in seawater but also to drink it in copious volumes. Russell set up practice in the fishing village of Brighthelmstone on the Sussex coast and became so successful that the town grew and grew and transmogrified into Brighton, the most fashionable coastal resort in the world in its day. Russell has been called “the inventor of the sea.”
Many in the early days bathed naked (and often caused much outrage among those inclined to take a good long look, sometimes with the aid of a telescope) while the more modest draped themselves liberally, and sometimes dangerously, in heavy robes. The real outrage came when the poorer elements started to turn up; they often stripped off on the beach “in promiscuous numbers” and then shuffled into the water for what was, for most of them, effectively their one bath of the year. For purposes of modesty bathing machines were invented. These were simply wagons that could be wheeled into the water, with doors and steps that allowed the client to enter the water safely and discreetly. A big part of the beneficial effects of sea bathing wasn’t the immersion so much as the vigorous rubbing down with dry flannels afterward.
Brighton’s future was permanently assured when in September 1783, just as the American Revolution ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris, the Prince of Wales visited the resort for the first time. He hoped to find some relief from swollen glands in his throat, and did. He liked Brighton so much that he immediately built his exotic Pavilion there. The prince installed a private bath that was filled with seawater so that he didn’t have to expose himself to the gaze of the common people when he took his treatments.
George III, similarly seeking privacy, went to Weymouth, a sleepy port farther west in Dorset on the south coast, but was dismayed to find thousands of well-wishers on the beach waiting to observe his first dip. When he entered the water, draped in a voluminous gown of blue serge, a band hidden in a neighboring bathing machine struck up “God Save the King.” Still, the king loved his trips to Weymouth and went almost annually until his growing madness made it impossible for him to submit his troubled brain to public gaze.
The novelist and doctor Tobias Smollett, who suffered from respiratory difficulties, took the practice to the Mediterranean. He went swimming daily in Nice, to the astonishment of the locals. “They thought it very strange, that a man seemingly consumptive should plunge into the sea, especially when the weather was so cold; and some of the doctors prognosticated immediate death,” one contemporary wrote. In fact, the practice caught on and Smollett’s book Travels Through France and Italy (1766) did a great deal to create the Riviera.
It didn’t take long for charlatans to realize that good money could be made in the bathing game. One of the most successful was James Graham (1745–1794). A self-proclaimed physician, unqualified by anything beyond his own bravura, Graham became hugely successful in Bath and London in the second half of the eighteenth century. He used magnets, batteries, and other thrumming apparatus to cure patients of any number of disorders, but especially those responsible for sexual unhappiness, such as impotence and frigidity.