The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [48]
In Tobias Smollett’s satirical novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, a family treks through the spas and bathing places of Britain. Although hot-water spas were flourishing when Smollett wrote in 1771, the head of the fictional family, Matthew Bramble, is revolted by their unsavoury conditions. At one, ghostly-looking patients in the last stages of consumption linger round the hot well. When Bramble enters the water at Bath, he meets a child covered with scrofulous ulcers, and he frets, “Suppose the matter of these ulcers, floating on the water, comes in contact with my skin, when the pores are all open, I would ask you what must be the consequence?”
“They may say what they will, but it does one ten times more good to leave Bath than to go to it.”
—Horace Walpole, in a letter to the naturalist George Montagu
Fortunately for Bramble, there is a healthier alternative at Scarborough, where Britons under doctors’ orders plunge into the North Sea. Even in July, Bramble cannot help “sobbing and bawling out” from its briny cold, but it is a punishment he prefers to the disease-laden waters of the mineral spas. Smollett paints a graphic genre picture of ladies and gentlemen entering Scarborough’s bathing machines, aquatic coaches where the men strip and the ladies change into flannel bathing costumes while being carried to a depth that accommodates their modesty. After their bath, they return to the confines of the machine and disembark, dressed, on the beach. Of this “noble bath,” Bramble’s nephew writes, “You cannot conceive what a flow of spirits it gives, and how it braces every sinew of the human frame.”
Cranky, hypochondriacal Matthew Bramble resembled his creator in several ways. As a doctor, patient and writer, Smollett was a lifelong devotee of cold, clear water. Born in Dumbartonshire, in the west of Scotland, he grew up swimming in the Leven River. After apprenticing in surgery, he moved to London and built a literary life that included fiction, history and journalism. In 1752, in An Essay on the External Use of Water, he took issue with the unhealthy conditions at Bath. His description of the filthy water was bad enough, but that had often been noted. What dismayed Bath’s promoters more, because it was a relatively novel idea—and voiced by a doctor—was Smollett’s conviction that the vaunted minerals in the spa’s water did little beyond blocking the pores and producing a crust on the skin. This marks an important shift in scientific thinking, away from the centuries-old conviction that plugged pores preserved the crucial balance of the humours and prevented the entry of disease. Now, with the doctrine of the humours falling from favour and a new appreciation of the role of perspiration, Smollett’s contemporaries increasingly believed that pores should be open. Ultimately, that “new” idea would lead to the promotion of regular washing.
Smollett insisted that it was ordinary water, “the Element itself,” without minerals, that improved a host of disorders. In his forties and fifties, haggard and ill, suffering from asthma and what may have been the beginnings of tuberculosis, he had frequent occasion to test his belief. He spent two years, from 1764 to 1766, living on the Continent. Although he took an interest in the remnants of Roman baths—reporting with disgust that grimy-looking women were washing clothes in the baths at Nîmes—warm water struck him as a suspicious, self-indulgent element. People who lived in hot countries, he admitted, needed cleansing baths, “especially before the use of linen was known.” But how much better it would have been for the Romans if they had plunged into the Tiber rather than their warm baths, “which became altogether a point of luxury borrowed from the effeminate Asiatics, and tended to debilitate the fibres already too much relaxed by the heat of the climate.”