Marketplace of the Marvelous (18 page)

Drinking too much water could be deadly, too. Ingesting more water than the kidneys can properly handle can dilute the concentration of salt in the blood necessary for proper functioning of the body, a condition known as hyponatremia. Left untreated, a patient may lapse into a coma that can lead to death. It takes a lot of water to cause hyponatremia, but James Wilson perhaps flirted with danger, though unknown at the time, by drinking so many glasses of water before breakfast.
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Hydropathy's critics delighted in recounting patients' tales of peril from the nation's water cures and heaped abuse on hydropaths. American medical journals did their best to discredit hydropathy by making frequent references to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's harrowing 1736 experience at a water cure, where, Rousseau claimed, the waters had “nearly relieved me, not only of my ills, but of my life.” Few seemed to care that Rousseau's visit occurred a century before Priessnitz had developed his system. Cartoonists loved to depict water-cure patients so swollen with water that they exploded or, alternatively, patients so saturated that they needed wringing out.
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After Catharine Beecher's ringing endorsement of hydropathy and her experiences at Brattleboro appeared in the pages of the
New York Observer
, the
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
sarcastically rejoined, “Ah! Blessed era for the washerwomen! How should the hotel chamber-maids rejoice? There is no longer need of airing or drying sheets . . . the miserable wretches who have gone out of the world with pleurisy and rheumatism, from sleeping in these damp envelopes, were entirely mistaken; they were actually better for it, or would have been had they not stopped too soon.”
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Not many irregular medical systems escaped the harsh gaze and withering critiques of Oliver Wendell Holmes, who traced the evolution of the water cure while critiquing another of his favorite targets,
homeopathy, as yet another ridiculous and illogical system. Holmes characterized Dr. Wesselhoeft as one of many “empirics, ignorant barbers, and men of that sort . . . who announce themselves ready to relinquish all the accumulated treasure of our art, to trifle with life upon the strength of these fantastic theories.
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Many other people, including some outside medicine, agreed with him. On a trip to Europe, American writer John W. DeForest visited Priessnitz's cure at Grafenberg. He complained not only of the treatment he received but also of the climate, the water regimen itself, and the food, which he called “an insult to the palate and an injury to the stomach.”
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Poet and writer John Townsend Trowbridge was more generous than Holmes and DeForest, praising the restful conditions he experienced while visiting a water cure even though the treatments provided him little relief from his so-called “nervous debility” that kept his mind constantly whirring and disrupted his sleep. He was less impressed with his fellow patients, however, whom he accused of being self-absorbed, concerned only with their invalidism, a topic of conversation he found “not cheeringly tonic.”
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Although hydropathy continued to be widely popular, pessimistic reports on the validity of a single-cure system continued to appear through the mid-nineteenth century. The
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
reported that water had proved unsuccessful at treating most illnesses. Many regular doctors were convinced that hydropathic patients got better not because of the treatment but because its very mildness let nature do its job.
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And it was true that most patients who visited water cures got better. In part, it was because most patients had to travel to a water cure, which virtually excluded those with serious acute or critical conditions from the start. Even those who practiced at home had to have the strength and stamina to follow the routine. Most patients suffered mild or chronic complaints often brought on or aggravated by the stresses of modern urban living. To feel better, they needed only some rest and relaxation, which hydropathy usually provided. Some critics also pointed out that despite hydropaths' claims to the contrary, the water-cure regimen was just as rigorous and invasive as heroic medicine with its weeks of wraps, long walks, showers, enemas, injections, and demands to drink more than ten glasses of water a day. Maybe it was better to be bled once than to endure more than fifteen hours a day in treatment, even if it was only water.
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Hydropaths themselves struggled to stay loyal to water as a cure-all.
Practitioners came to hydropathy with varying levels of qualifications, experience, and motivations for practicing. From the very beginning, some followers combined water cure with homeopathy, vegetarianism, medical gymnastics, and vapor baths. Sylvester Graham's hygiene program, especially its promotion of vegetarianism and exercise, formed a natural partnership with hydropathy, and the two often coexisted at water-cure institutions. Grahamites liked hydropathy because it was natural and did not involve drugs, which they, too, saw as unnecessary and harmful. Temperance advocates also found common cause with hydropaths, who shared their high regard for water as the only healthful beverage.
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All of these practices peaceably coexisted because unlike Samuel Thomson, hydropaths never enforced a dogmatic adherence to a strict theory and set of practices; all practitioners, more or less, agreed on the basics of the system but were free to carry them out however they saw fit. At Brattleboro, Dr. Wesselhoeft allowed small doses of regular medicine when used in combination with hydropathy. Mary Gove Nichols blended hydropathy with other theories and systems when treating patients. She allowed her patients to use homeopathy on occasion, figuring that dabbling in other irregular systems was always preferable to regular medicine. She herself had run a Grahamite boardinghouse in Boston before turning to hydropathy. While this flexibility allowed for much more personal interpretation and camaraderie among hydropaths and other reformers, it also undermined hydropathy in the end by minimizing the very things that made hydropathy unique as a healing system. A diversity of personalities and beliefs discouraged standardization and sometimes even led to practices that contradicted pure hydropathic theory.
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This became increasingly true as overall health hygiene—clean drinking water, waste disposal, sanitary housing—began to supplant water as the primary healer in the mid-nineteenth century. Hydropaths came to place as much faith in diet and exercise as water as the century wore on, a shift that removed the distinctive healing properties attributed solely to water. They gave up their systematic approach to water without offering an alternative means of advancing their principles. Without water, hydropathy lost its core value as well as its rationale for wrapping, bathing, and other water-related treatments.
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The hydropathic embrace of other therapies and novel ideas had its limits, though: most hydropaths ignored new discoveries and innovations in regular medical therapies and research, such as vaccinations,
which cost them in the end. Scientific advances in the second half of the nineteenth century elevated the hospital and the laboratory to prominence, relegating self-taught and untrained doctors to the periphery of the emerging professional and scientifically oriented medical field.
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In a world that seemed increasingly complex, Americans began turning to experts to guide them. With hydropaths unwilling to distinguish between degree-trained practitioners and those who came to water cure by experience, they no longer appeared to be on the cutting edge of reform.
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Hydropathy also continued to resist national organizations and professional schools at the same time that regular medicine and even other irregulars were finding identity as cohesive and institutional powers. The Nicholses' drive toward a professional education for hydropaths with the opening of their American Hydropathic Institute failed to gain traction. They operated the school for three terms and then abandoned it. Trall's New York school suffered from low standards and a “woefully inadequate” staff, according to one chronicler.
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Other hydropathic schools opened in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Minnesota, but most closed quickly. Moreover, rigorous standards and formal training were contrary to the democratic tenets of hydropathy, so these educational efforts were handicapped from the start.
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To ensure a more secure economic and social position for themselves, regular doctors established medical societies and legislative standards aimed at excluding hydropaths from participating in the growing field of public health. Medical councils, hospitals, and city boards of health banned hydropaths from serving even as the issues they often addressed, like sanitation and green spaces, were much the same hygienic measures promoted for decades by hydropaths for health and healing. Hydropaths tried to fight back by criticizing regular doctors for taking the power of choice away from patients in deciding who could and could not practice medicine.
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Despite regular medicine's refusal to recognize them as legitimate doctors, though, many of the hydropaths' principles and innovations slowly became incorporated into regular medicine over succeeding decades. Advances in the germ theory of disease in the 1860s and 1870s led to an appreciation of bathing and overall cleanliness among regular doctors, who began to adopt and endorse the lifestyle recommendations long advocated by hydropaths. Bathing and
staying hydrated with water appeared in a range of late-nineteenth-century health literature authored not by hydropaths but by new self-proclaimed experts in hygiene and public health maintenance. Later, in the early twentieth century, medical scientists also joined with public health proponents to address many of the issues that hydropaths and other hygiene reformers had long fought for like sanitation, diet, and exercise.
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The nation's changing political and social culture also drowned hydropathy. The Civil War in particular brutalized hydropaths' dreams of achieving individual and cultural perfection and harmony through their tenets of self-control and good health. They found that their idealism could not stand up against the harsh realities of a war that pitted Americans against one another.

The upheavals of the Civil War sped along shifting tides in popular culture as well. Following the war, what made for a good citizen changed. The self-denial and self-control that marked the early nineteenth century gave way to a more self-indulgent, pleasure-seeking, and consumer-oriented American people. Restraint and moderation, hydropathy's unspoken mottos, were not the way to make a fortune in urban industrial America. Women also gained more public influence in other areas, eclipsing what had been a unique and empowering aspect of hydropathy. Many women joined a variety of social and political reform movements, including suffrage and labor activism, that invited the active participation of both men and women.
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Many water cures that survived the Civil War raised the temperature of their water and introduced gentler treatments to maintain their business. The increasing availability of in-home plumbing made the water cure less unique, so institutions added more non-water offerings to attract clients. Cures in Massachusetts and New York added billiards, dancing, vaudeville performances, and bowling. The cold-water cures also faced competition from luxurious resorts that catered to the conspicuous leisure of the wealthy and fostered a concept of health that was far more passive and recreation oriented—much more like the spas of old.
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Even with hydropathy's decline, Mary Gove Nichols never stopped working and advocating for the causes in which she believed. In the 1850s the Nicholses turned increasingly from treating women's illnesses to a more radical attack on what Mary believed to be the ultimate source of their troubles: marriage. Despite being happily
married to Thomas, Mary never forgot the personal injury she suffered at the hands of her first husband. True marriage, she argued, came from love, not the legally binding strictures that largely left women powerless victims of their husbands. Thomas agreed. The idea of marriage as an institution outside the law was a real shocker in 1850s America, though, and earned the Nicholses branding as “free lovers.” Not to be confused with the 1960s idea, free love in the 1850s was a movement opposed to marriage, at least as an institution regulated by government. Many advocates equated marriage with slavery for the wife. Even among hydropaths, the Nicholses' views on marriage were pretty far out there, driving them to the fringes of the main current of health reform. In 1861, at the outbreak of the Civil War, Mary and Thomas sailed to England and rode out the war abroad, publishing stories and articles that had little do with health, medicine, or hydropathy. After the war, they returned to health reform, operating a health resort in Malvern, England, the same town that hosted the institution of the water-guzzling James Wilson. They also wrote on medical topics, though without the overtones of free love that sank their reputation in the United States.
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At the end of her life, Mary joined the ranks of another health trend, mesmerism, and relied more on magnetic power than water to heal patients. She passed her hands over injuries and provided magnetized objects to patients that cured without physical contact. In 1882, Mary received a diagnosis of breast cancer and soon attempted to treat herself with the methods she had long advocated for others. Every morning and every evening she magnetized her body for ten minutes. Bathing remained integral to her routine, and she took almost daily baths for health. She also exercised regularly and maintained a Grahamite vegetarian diet. She practiced a little homeopathy. Through it all, Mary continued to see and treat patients until two weeks before her death on May 30, 1884, dedicated to the end to improving the health of humanity and the prospects of women—a truly visionary and progressive woman. Mary's frankness on the physiology of women's bodies and the constraints of marriage contrasted sharply with the prudery of her age.
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