The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [113]
By 1839 Pressnitz numbered among his clients a monarch, a duke, 22 princes and princesses, 149 counts and countesses, 80 barons and baronesses, 14 generals, 535 staff officers, and other lesser hypochondriac fry. The Grafenberg course of treatment was uncomfortable, including ‘the wet sheet’, ‘the sweating blanket’, ‘the plunge bath’, the sitz bath, ‘the falling and rising douche’and the head bath. One day’s treatment would include all versions of the therapy and always involved cold water. Large quantities of water were also drunk during the treatment: eight to ten glasses would be taken before breakfast. In one case a lady drank twenty-one pints in a morning, developed numbness in the feet and became unconscious.
Accommodation at Grafenberg was cramped and spartan. The rules forbade reading, smoking, gambling and, since many of the patients were syphilitic, immoral activity. In the food hall more than five hundred patients ate appalling meals to the accompaniment of martial music, as the smell of cows in the rooms below mingled with the fresh air howling in through the open windows. Since the aim of the treatment was to cause a ‘bodily crisis’which would force the poisons out of the body, whatever cases of boils and diarrhoea occurred - and they were frequent - were welcomed as signs of recovery.
Inevitably the idea of the water cure spread. By 1842 there were fifty establishments all over Germany. Two English doctors came to Grafenberg in search of a cure. One of them, James Wilson, was constipated and had ‘no calves’. The other, James Gully, was the editor of a medical journal. Wilson reported later that during his course he had taken 500 cold baths, 2400 sitz baths and 3500 glasses of water. Both men were convinced by the treatment. On their return to England they leased the Crown Hotel, in Malvern, a spot already renowned for its wells and drinking water.
By 1850 the Malvern water cure was the rage of English society, attracting such notables as Dickens, Florence Nightingale, Tennyson and Carlyle. An anonymous book was written about the place, entitled Three Weeks in Wet Sheets. The fashion spread to the ‘Northern Grafenberg’, in Otley, Yorkshire, where there was also a compressed-air bath. Soon there were ‘Grafenbergs’in Matlock, Derbyshire, in various parts of Scotland and, fittingly enough, in Blarney, Ireland.
While the cure was of doubtful efficacy, it illustrates the changing view of disease among Victorian Europeans faced with an epidemic on the scale of cholera. Society became hypochondriac. Concern for health and fitness verged on the paranoiac. Sickness took on a new significance in the strict God-fearing society of the time. To be ill was sinful. One of the great Victorian philosophers, Herbert Spencer, said:
Perhaps nothing will so much hasten the time when body and mind will be adequately cared for as a diffusion of the belief that the preservation of health is a duty. The fact is that all breaches of the law of health are physical sins.
Mid-nineteenth-century water cures. Walking barefoot in wet grass or snow became a fashionable social pastime and was also recommended for toothache.
The surge of interest in physical fitness and mens sana in corpore sano that followed the cholera epidemic found expression in sport, ordinarily associated only with hunting, shooting and fishing. Games had previously been considered pastimes for children. Cholera changed all that.
In 1855 the Boy’s Own Book listed archery, gymnastics, fencing, driving and riding as valuable therapeutic activities. Twenty-five years later the publication included football, hockey, baseball, golf, shinty, croquet, lawn billiards, rackets, fives, tennis, pallone, lawn tennis, badminton, lacrosse, bowls, broadsword, singlestick, bicycling,