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By Root 1091 0

problem was psychological. Listen to Montaigne in 1580: “How many men have been made sick by the mere power of imagination? We see them regularly, having themselves bled, purged, and physicked, to cure ills that they feel only in their mind. When real evil fails us, knowledge lends us hers.”3 Most everyone who offers a happiness treatment in today’s America has a rationalist theory of why their treatment works. People don’t announce that they are poking you with magic needles. But just being touched by attentive hands helps a lot of what ails many of us, and the ritual of being taken care of can be affecting, whether it takes place in the theater of medicine or under the lavender lights of a spa treatment room. There are grooming treatments that provide comparable effects. This is part of the reason there are so many nail salons, and why so many hair-stylists include some massage, hot towels, and fragrant elixirs. Barbers used to be surgeons, of course, and not only because they were the only ones in town with a straight razor. Grooming shops and medicine are all of a family: providers of happiness treatments for the body. They are where you go to get taken care of.

The great historical happiness treatment is the water cure. When building a new town, the public bathhouse was the first thing the ancient Romans usually constructed. It was the Romans who made the Belgian town of Spa famous for its spring waters, which is where we get our word. Spas were an opportunity for social travel, going someplace else: high or low altitudes, clean air, dry or moist climates. Doctors prescribed retreat to such climates, and as a result, sanatoriums arose there. In history, the most enthusiastic spa-goers were the sophisticated ancient Romans and the urbane cosmopolitan bourgeoisie of the European Industrial Revolution. Spas are rural outposts for a tired urban population that sees itself as so depleted that it needs to soak in minerals.

Roman spas were fairly routinized: you arrived, got naked, had oil rubbed on you, then went into a warm room full of couches where people would lie around talking. Later you’d move on to a very hot bath, where you would sit and sweat, scraping your skin with a special tool. Often they had slaves to do the scraping.4 Then it was a quick dip in hot water, then a quick dip in cold water. In 70 C.E. the Romans built a spa around the hot springs at Bath, England, that bubbled magnesium, potassium, sulfur, and calcium. By the year 300 C.E. there were over nine hundred baths throughout the empire, and at the height of this water indulgence, thirteen aqueducts supplied ancient Rome with three hundred gallons of water per person per day. There is no greater act of conspicuous consumption than letting fountains spill water down parched streets. Soaking is, in part, a display of having enough water.

At various baths across history, there have been treatments that assault the patients with water. The logic behind this is that human bodies are bags of various fluids—call them humors or hormones or chemicals—and vitality is maintained through the movement of these fluids from their points of origin to the rest of the body and then either out or back to where they started. When the liquid needs to move down, gravity does it. To move liquid up and around, we have the pumping heart, and our voluntary movement, which squishes and squeezes everything around. The more sedentary we are, the more reasonable it is to assume that our juices will get stuck—amid muscle fibers, in the extremities, and in the gut. Western medicine speaks of moving lymph through the body: Eastern medical arts speak of chi. Tai chi is a meditation you do while moving, so your chi can flow. Similar explanations are offered for the pleasure of being massaged, acupunctured, sweated, and helped into strained positions, from yoga to Pilates. All these behaviors have been reinvented many times since the ancient world, often with startling enthusiasm. In the mid nineteenth century, James Caleb Jackson presented water therapy as so stunningly new that it