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By Root 717 0

was no one overriding reason why America became the standard-bearer of personal cleanliness, but rather a confluence of several reasons. Americans prided themselves on their penchant for innovation, from the remarkable invention of New World democracy to the Yankee ingenuity that produced a better apple—corer. Scrupulous personal cleanliness and the means to achieve it—piped—in hot water, toilet soap, even the advertising that alerted people to the benefits of hygiene—were new. Without an inherited caste system, Americans were looking for more egalitarian ways to define civility and mark status, and cleanliness, which was increasingly within the grasp of most Americans, turned out to be a good way to do that. Their success during the Civil War in controlling disease through hygiene led them to see it as progressive and civic-minded. They loved what was religious and patriotic, and by the last decades of the century, cleanliness had become firmly linked not only to godliness but also to the American way.

In addition, Americans prided themselves on their open—mindedness, a quality that could strike others as a susceptibility to fads and crank theories. An early craze that inclined them to think well of water and cleanliness was hydropathy, which seized the country in mid-century. Hydropathy, or the water cure, came to America from Silesia, the mountainous corner of central Europe shared by Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia. There a farmer named Vincenz Priessnitz claimed to have healed a feverish cow and his own sprained wrist and crushed ribs with cold water and wet bandages. When he opened a treatment centre called Grafenburg in 1826, forty-nine people came seeking help. Fifteen years later, the patients numbered from 1,500 to 1,700 annually, and Priessnitz had earned the equivalent of 150,000 dollars. His clientele included princes and princesses, counts and countesses, generals and priests. It was not unusual at Grafenburg to find titled Austrian women standing naked in the pine woods under a wooden pipe that spouted spring water.

A devotee of Vincenz Priessnitz’s hydropathy takes an outdoor shower in Silesia. Nineteenth-century Americans took up his cold-water cure enthusiastically.

Priessnitz’s reported success at curing a wide variety of illnesses moved doctors to cut open his sponges, looking for the medicine hidden in them, but there was none. He believed that disease left the body through the skin, so he concentrated on cleaning and opening the pores and encouraging circulation with plain, cold water. If the problem was localized, there were baths for the afflicted part. For more general complaints, Priessnitz developed the wet sheet, which could envelop the patient for several hours.

Although the majority of his patients came from Central Europe, some were Americans, including Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from an American medical school. Back home, the Americans spread the water-cure doctrine to an audience that took it up enthusiastically. Perhaps because they lacked Europe’s established spas and because hydropathy suited their liking for pragmatism, economy and self-reliance, Americans welcomed it with particular fervour. Although one of the attractions of hydropathy was that it could be practised at home, there were more than two hundred water-cure centres, stretching from Maine to San Francisco. In the 1850s, the Water-Cure Journal, which appeared twice a month, counted 100,000 subscribers. Hydropathy remained popular from the 1840s to 1900, but its greatest days were over by the beginning of the Civil War.

MATRIMONIAL CORRESPONDENCE

“I am nineteen years old; and a strong believer in the Water-Cure system, Temperance and Woman’s Rights. I am in part vegetarian, eat flesh-meat occasionally, but care nothing about it. I drink cold water entirely, and bathe twice a day.”

—A letter in the Water-Cure Journal, 1854, from a woman who called herself “Crazy Sabe”

Although hydropathic procedures can sound like summer camp pranks, water-cure enthusiasts were often intellectuals and