% Trusting the Water Cure
% W. Caleb McDaniel
% July 24, 2012
Historians of the early republic now understand a great deal about how
the post office, the steam engine, the telegraph, and the printing press
helped to stitch a growing nation together while simultaneously
connecting Americans to a wider world. The "water cure," a
nineteenth-century health reform movement also known as hydropathy, was
in many ways the perfect example of how an antebellum "communications
revolution" created extensive information networks on even the most
obscure topics. After its genesis in Austria in the 1830s and 1840s, by
the 1850s the "water cure" claimed a transatlantic following with
devotees as diverse as Charles Darwin, Stonewall Jackson, David Ruggles,
Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a host of unknown clients from Russia,
Germany, Italy, and beyond. By the beginning of the Civil War, the New
York City newspaper, *The Water-Cure Journal*, claimed tens of thousands
of subscribers, and over 200 hydropathic establishments dotted the
country from upstate New York, to Biloxi, Mississippi, and Salem,
Oregon.[^1]
Yet health reform movements like the "water cure" also illustrate the
two biggest points I would like to make in this talk. First, information
networks built by new institutions, technologies, and publications never
wholly displaced interpersonal networks as conduits of information. New
media has almost always been "social" media, and in the early republic
friends and family members remained crucial sources of information who
shared and spread the news they liked and steered each other away from
what they did not. Leaders and fans of alternative health movements
understood this well. The followers of homeopathist Samuel Thomson sent
agents into 22 states and territories by 1833 to form "Friendly
Societies," local groups of families and friends who could support each
other and share information about botanical remedies. The publishers of
the *Water-Cure Journal* likewise built their subscription base by
offering prizes to readers who used their interpersonal ties to bring
friends or family members to the cause. Such savvy tactics showed an
awareness of how important the social network was to the spread of new
ideas.[^2]
A second point I want to make today is related to the first:
interpersonal communication networks remained important in the early
nineteenth century not just as means of *circulating* information, but
as means of cultivating *trust* in information. The case of the "water
cure" helps make this point especially clear, for the dramatic spread of
hydropathy was more than just a matter of spreading news and methods.
Rather, the spread of hydropathy was the product of countless private
decisions by individuals to place their *trust* in "water cure"
therapies--enough trust to try them on their own bodies or the bodies of
those they loved.
The ailing American abolitionist Henry Clarke Wright made that decision
in the winter of 1843 and 1844, when he traveled to the Austrian water
cure establishment run by Vincent Priessnitz in Graefenberg, nestled
high in the Silesian alps. Priessnitz was renowned as the inventor of
hydropathy, and by the time Wright arrived he was attracting as many as
1700 people a year to Graefenberg. True believers in Priessnitz's
methods for curing illness preached that anyone could practice
hydropathy, even in their own home. But Wright, who had suffered for
much of the year with a persistent cough, was persuaded to travel all
the way to the water cure's source to consult with Priessnitz
himself.[^3]
The methods that Wright discovered there shared much in common with
other contemporary health reforms--hostility to drugs and "heroic"
therapies like blood-letting, distrust of traditional physicians, an
emphasis on diet and preventive hygiene, and a belief that restoring the
sick to health was mostly a matter of allowing nature take its course.
But what distinguished Priessnitz's ideas from other cures was the
belief that applications of water alone could resolve most illnesses,
whether they were chronic or acute. Patients like Wright were wrapped in
freezing cold wet sheets and then cocooned in thick blankets to relieve
fever. Water cure patients sat in water, submerged themselves in water,
stood under water as it was poured over them, wore wet compresses,
wrapped themselves in dripping sheets, and ate a meager diet washed
down, of course, with water.
Needless to say, these experiences were not always pleasant in an Alpine
winter. Nine weeks into his stay, Wright described climbing into baths
rimmed with ice and confessed to a friend in England that he had
developed a "perfect *Hydrophobia*. I have a horror of cold water. I
can't get warm. But I'm told it is a good sign!" Wright went on to joke
with his correspondent, another water cure devotee, about the seeming
absurdity of his position. "Oh dear me!" he exclaimed. "Weakness, low
spirits, shiverings & shakings, fever, head-ache, tooth-ache, & every
other ache, a good sign! Well---I know my *lungs* are getting well."[^4]
In these lines, Wright pinpointed the paradox at the heart of
hydropathy: Priessnitz held that wet sheets and douches worked by
bringing the body to a moment of crisis, in which any morbid elements
would be expelled. But in practice, this meant that patients who began
to feel *worse* under Priessnitz's ministrations were often told they
were getting better! "Everything is reversed here," Wright explained, "&
you are counted fortunate & happy according to the intensity of your
pain & anguish. 'The cure is taking effect' is the consolatory response
to all your groans & cries of torture."[^5]
Such candid admissions may seem amusing in retrospect, but they point to
a problem that historians of the cure have only partially answered: in
the heat (or the cold!) of the moment, how and why did water cure
patients decide to *trust* specific treatments and doctors to make them
well, even in the face of their own doubts or awareness of
countervailing evidence? The experience of another, more famous
abolitionist highlights how potentially unamusing such decisions could
be. In April 1849, William Lloyd Garrison and his wife Helen Garrison
watched with growing concern as their six-year-old son, Charles Follen
Garrison, "complained of feeling unwell." Through several days of
vomiting and flu-like symptoms, the Garrisons attempted to treat their
son with the water cure, wrapping him in "the wet sheet three or four
times." When that failed, Lloyd later reported in an anguished letter,
"we also gave him the homeopathic prescriptions as accurately as we
could discover his symptoms described in our books, but without much
skill or knowledge." Finally, after four days, while still "hesitating
whether to go for a physician," Garrison was "advised by a friend to try
a medicated vapor bath."[^6]
The same friend "said that his wife would be happy to administer it,"
and Garrison quickly agreed, believing that sweating was what Charley
needed---a key premise for movements like hydropathy. He therefore
agreed to make an "experiment" of the vapor bath, and even helped his
friend's wife strap his lethargic son into a wooden chair positioned
above steaming water. Almost as soon as the "bath" began, however, the
poor boy became, in Garrison's words, "perfectly frantic . . . his
screams were appalling." When Charley was removed, fifteen or twenty
minutes later, Garrison discovered, too late, that his child had been
horribly scalded by steam from the vapor bath, "the skin being entirely
destroyed on one side." A few days later, the injured boy died, leaving
his parents enveloped in guilt and grief.[^7]
As the Garrisons' tragic experience shows, decisions to trust
alternative therapies and delay other sorts of care could quickly become
matters of life and death for nineteenth-century families. Yet
Garrison's story illustrates just how persistent *trust* in the water
cure or similar therapies could be, even in the face of strong
countervailing evidence that the cures were not working or were actively
causing harm. In this case, as Garrison later explained, "such was my
confidence in the judgment of the lady" who administered the vapor bath
that "I did not even suspect that she might be raising the steam to an
undue height." As his son screamed in pain, Garrison even "appealed to
his little manhood in the best way I could . . . urging him to bear it
all with fortitude, as he would undoubtedly be benefitted by the
operation."[^8]
All parents face difficult choices when trying to care for a suffering
child. But it is still appropriate to ask why someone like Garrison
could place so much confidence in the prescriptions or judgments of
alternative health practitioners, enough to urge his son to endure an
obviously botched treatment? In the case of the water cure, the current
historiography answers questions like this only in the most general
terms. Scholars have explained the attractions of hydropathy partly by
contrasting its relatively passive and hygenic regime with "harsh"
conventional techniques practiced by professional doctors. And
historians have also shown why hydropathy complemented general currents
in antebellum culture, especially to women and reformers drawn to the
camaraderie and respite of water cure establishments and the ethic of
individual empowerment and non-conformism offered by the cure. More
generally, historians of alternative medicine have shown why cures that
seem ridiculous now made sense given nineteenth-century assumptions
about the body and its operations that patients, physicians, and
alternative practitioners all, to some extent, shared. Historians of
medicine also point to the charisma and savvy marketing skills of
individual physicians as crucial to establishing the credibility of
unconventional therapies.[^9]
Yet while all of these approaches do much to explain why antebellum
Americans in general might be attracted to hydropathy or persuaded to
try its methods, they are less successful when it comes to explaining
specific decisions by specific individuals like Garrison and Wright. For
example, pointing to the perils of professional medicine at the time
does not explain fully why a patient might trust the water cure over
other alternative therapies, or why patients trusted certain
combinations of therapies. As Garrison's experience illustrates,
antebellum Americans attracted to hydropathy seldom chose one therapy,
even to address one case of illness. To understand the decision-making
matrices that produced their trust in these therapeutic regimes, we need
to know more than the things that made the water cure culturally
appealing.[^10]
It is here, I think, that attention to interpersonal networks of
information may ultimately provide insights that an exclusively
macroscopic approach cannot. Antebellum Americans who trusted the water
cure did not make their decisions in a vacuum or solely with the help of
impersonal media like printed books, which, as Garrison's testimony
shows, could fail to offer consolation and help in a moment of crisis.
In those moments, most people do---and did---turn to the embodied or
empathetic knowledge provided by close friends and family members.
Significantly, Garrison tried the vapor bath for his son largely on the
advice of "a friend."[^11]
The role that such friends played in shaping decisions like Garrison's
is not easy to measure, primarily because obtaining glimpses into the
private decisions of individual patients is more difficult than counting
the number of water cure establishments or subscriptions to water cure
publications. Garrison and Wright were hardly representative Americans,
and may not even have been representative of those who tried alternative
therapies like the water cure. Nonetheless, in their cases and others,
anecdotal evidence *does* suggest the importance of close interpersonal
ties of kinship and friendship in engendering confidence in hydropathy.
Wright, for example, was largely convinced to visit Graefenberg on the
recommendation of his friend Elizabeth Pease, a Quaker abolitionist from
Darlington, England, who frequented a water cure establishment at Ben
Rhydding and who met many American abolitionists in person during their
tours of the British Isles. Wright and Pease were also critical to
Garrison's decision to try the water cure only a few months before
Charley's death. When Garrison, a longtime adherent of homeopathic
treatments, became ill in the spring of 1848, he initially considered
using sarsaparilla. But, as he told his good friend Pease, "dear Henry
is urging me very strongly to go to Dr. [David] Ruggles's Water Cure
Establishment in Northampton," and Pease added her own strong
endorsements of that advice, writing later that year that she hoped
"hydropathy may do as much for thee as under the blessing of God, it has
done for me."[^12]
Garrison and Wright were not the only American abolitionists whom Pease
ultimately persuaded to trust or try the water cure. In 1847 she also
recommended the cure to the invalid wife of Boston abolitionist Wendell
Phillips, who told Pease in August 1847 that "your cordial description
of Ben Rhydding would almost draw Ann across the water. She looks
longingly on the Cure, & may try it yet." When Wendell and Ann Phillips
did ultimately go to Northampton to seek help from David Ruggles, the
African American hydropathist, Wendell gratefully informed Pease of
their decision "to try your own valued water cure." And Garrison's own
eventual decision to go to Northampton also highlighted the importance
of a valuable friend like Pease, the only correspondent to whom Garrison
confided the details of Charley's gruesome death, in prompting
individual decisions to act. In a letter of introduction to British
abolitionists written for his friend Maria Weston Chapman, who was about
to cross the Atlantic, Garrison noted that Pease would be "highly
gratified on hearing that I am at last trying the 'Water Cure.'" And in
the same letter, he wrote, in reference to Pease, "what would the world
be without such friendship?"[^13]
A world without such friendship may very well have been a world in which
the "water cure" had a less extensive and enduring reach. To be sure,
advice from friends was no guarantee that someone would trust
hydropathy, any more than exposure to an issue of the *Water Cure
Journal* might have been. Garrison had been "prevailed on" by friends to
try the water cure for years before he actually did so. Another Boston
abolitionist associated with Garrison confessed in a letter to an Irish
abolitionist that his family remained "a sad set of misbelievers" in the
"*hydromania*" of friends like Pease and Wright. For every example of
someone converted to the water cure by the recommendation of a friend or
relative, one could probably find another example of someone like the
abolitionist John Brown, who had "little faith in the water treatment"
even though his sons were devoted readers of the *Water Cure Journal*
and his wife visited Ruggles's water cure establishment. Indeed, the
authors of personal testimonials published in the *Water Cure Journal*
often boasted of their persistence in trusting the water cure *against*
the advice of their skeptical friends and family, or spoke vaguely of
having "heard of the Water-Cure" from no one in particular.[^14]
Nonetheless, beneath these proud statements of individual self-reliance
and skepticism, I suspect there are numerous experiences more akin to
Garrison's and Wright's, like the decisions of abolitionists Abby Kelley
and Stephen Foster to try the water cure only after urging from family
and friends, or the decision of Susan Helen DeKroyft, a popular
nineteenth-century author who began losing her eyesight in 1845 and
published a book of letters about her long search for a cure. DeKroyft's
journey began at the New York Institution for the Blind, but there she
was subjected to a battery of conflicting advice of what she should do.
"Last summer," she wrote, "the advice of all the doctors was, 'Go to the
springs; showering and bathing will do more for you than medicine,'"
while still others advised that she try a water cure establishment on
Long Island. "To that various objections were raised," not least from
DeKroyft herself, who was skeptical of hydropathy "until a friend gave
it a very satisfactory trial." This friend, equipped with her own douche
bath and water cure apparatus in her home, allowed DeKroyft to try the
method "with much benefit both to my general health and eyes." Another
"good friend" proved critical to her later decision to go to Long Island
after all.[^15]
I have sketched the outlines of a problem that I believe still warrants
examination: how did antebellum Americans decide to trust particular
information and recommendations about the water cure enough to submit to
its rigors? I have also suggested that an answer may lie in the
interpersonal means by which news of the water cure reached them. Both
the problem and the answer are only visible, however, if we take
seriously the difficult and sometimes agonizing choices that patients
had to make about therapy for themselves and their loved ones.
After all, when antebellum Americans like Garrison chose to apply the
water cure in their families, it was not a light decision. As Elizabeth
Cady Stanton once said in the case of her own son's sickness, which she
treated with the water cure, "I am anxious beyond endurance" and "feel
guilty when I have a sick child." In the face of such powerful emotions
of anxiety and guilt, simple belief in the proposition of the water cure
may well have needed the endorsement of other patients who were close
friends or kin. Helen DeKroyft suggested as much when she confessed that
"sometimes the simple, unvarnished story of a patient, tells more in
favor of the doctor than all of his long and well-written essays upon
Materia Medica, Theory and Practice."[^16]
To confirm that DeKroyft's insight was more widely shared would require
more research than I have presented today. But examining the importance
of inter-patient and interpersonal networks in the spread of the water
cure may prove useful for two groups of historians. For historians of
medicine who are usually focused on relations between doctor and
patient, the water cure may present a case in which networks and
friendships among patients proved critical to the cure's expansion and
credibility. Meanwhile, for historians of the communications revolution
in this period, the water cure suggests the need for continued attention
to the micro-historical scale of information exchange. Infrastructral
changes deserve most of the credit for the circulation and spread of
news about hydropathy, but understanding why particular people made
personal decisions to act on information received may require looking at
ties closer at hand.
[^1]: For overviews of the water cure and similar cures in the antebellum
United States, see Susan E. Cayleff, *Wash and Be Healed: The Water-Cure
Movement and Women’s Health* (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987),
figures cited on p. 3; Norman Gevitz, ed., *Other Healers: Unorthodox Medicine
in America* (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); Marshall Scott
Legan, “Hydropathy in America: A Nineteenth-Century Panacea,” *Bulletin of the
History of Medicine* 45 (September 1971): 267–280. On the transatlantic
dimensions of the movement, see Annette Nolte, “The Ebb and Flow of Hydropathy:
The Water-Cure Movement in Europe and America” (Ph.D diss., University of Texas
at Arlington, 2001). For the Mississippi hydro, see John Duffy, “Medical
Practice in the Ante Bellum South,” *Journal of Southern History* 25 (February
1959): 53–72. For Oregon, see G. Thomas Edwards, “Dr. Ada M. Weed: Northwest
Reformer,” *Oregon Historical Quarterly* 78 (March 1977): 4–40. On the
"communications revolution," see Daniel Walker Howe, *What Hath God Wrought:
The Transformation of America, 1815–1848* (New York: Oxford University Press,
2007); Richard R. John, *Spreading the News: The American Postal System From
Franklin To Morse* (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); John J.
McCusker, "The Demise of Distance: The Business Press and the Origins of the
Information Revolution in the Early Modern Atlantic World," *American
Historical Review* 110, no. 2 (2005), 295--321; Robert A. Gross and Mary
Kelley, eds., *An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New
Nation, 1790--1840* (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
[^2]: On Thomsonian "Friendly Societies," see William G. Rothstein, “The
Botanical Movements and Orthodox Medicine,” in *Other Healers:
Unorthodox Medicine in America*, ed. Norman Gevitz
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 29–51, esp. pp.
43--45. On contests to encourage new subscriptions, see Cayleff,
*Wash and Be Healed*, 26.
[^3]: On Wright, see Lewis Perry, *Childhood, Marriage, and Reform:
Henry Clarke Wright, 1797-1870* (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980). For Priessnitz's clients, see Cayleff, *Wash and Be
Healed*, 20–21.
[^4]: Henry Clarke Wright to Elizabeth Pease, March 13, 1844, Garrison
Family Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS, Am 1906
(653), hereafter cited as GFP.
[^5]: Henry Clarke Wright to Elizabeth Pease, March 27, 1844, Garrison
Family Papers.
[^6]: William Lloyd Garrison to Elizabeth Pease, June 20, 1849, LWLG
3:618--22, quoted on 619, 620.
[^7]: William Lloyd Garrison to Elizabeth Pease, June 20, 1849, LWLG
3:620. See also Harriet Hyman Alonso, *Growing Up Abolitionist: The
Story of the Garrison Children* (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2002), 57--61. A vapor bath like the one
Garrison tried was not among the techniques Priessnitz used, but as
Susan Cayleff notes, the "ideological purity" of the water cure
movement declined over time, as traditional methods like the wet
sheet began to be used alongside electrical treatments, mesmerism,
homeopathic therapies, and even clairvoyance. See Cayleff, *Wash and
Be Healed*, 103.
[^8]: William Lloyd Garrison to Elizabeth Pease, June 20, 1849, LWLG
3:620. Occasional stories of casualties even from the cold water
cure circulated in the correspondence of sympathizers and skeptics
alike. Irish abolitionist Richard Davis Webb, for example, reported
knowing a consumptive young man who panicked while wrapped in a wet
sheet pack and died after exhausting himself trying to escape. An
aunt of Webb's wife also reported having a paralytic attack during a
wet sheet bath. See RDW to NPR, November 17, 1844, Haverford
Collection 806, Box 1. Infections caused by unsanitary sheets were
also a real risk to patients of the cure. See Abby Kimber to Hannah
Webb, June 20, 1847, BPL, Ms.A.1.2.17.50
[^9]: See Charles E. Rosenberg, “The Therapeutic Revolution: Medicine,
Meaning, and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America,”
*Perspectives in Biology and Medicine* 20 (Summer 1977): 485–506;
Steven Shapin, “Trusting George Cheyne: Scientific Expertise, Common
Sense, and Moral Authority in Early Eighteenth-Century Dietetic
Medicine,” *Bulletin of the History of Medicine* 77 (Summer 2003):
263–297; Cayleff, *Wash and Be Healed*. For an account of Harriet
Beecher Stowe's conversion to hydropathy that reflects this
historiography and emphasizes broad cultural factors, see Joan D.
Hedrick, *Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life* (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994), 173--85.
[^10]: In the case of hydropathy, certainly, encounters with charismatic
practitioners like Priessnitz, whom Wright called "an extraordinary
man," were often decisive in making a person fall in love with the
water cure. Yet trust in water cure therapies often survived even
the death of prominent hydropathic practitioners whose methods
failed to work in their own cases. Often, as in Garrison's case,
Americans trusted alternative therapies enough to try them at home
and in the absence of professional guides who ran hydropathic
establishments. Finally, while the techniques of charismatic doctors
to build credibility with patients undoubteduly played key roles in
cultivating trust, they do not fully explain why a patient would
seek out a doctor in the first place, or trust one charismatic
practitioner over another.
[^11]: Some more recent research suggests the importance of
interpersonal connections and experience in shaping patient
decisions about whether to, say, breastfeed an infant or accept
prenatal genetic screening during pregnancy. Such forms of embodied
knowledge, I am suggesting, played similar roles in the decisions of
nineteenth-century Americans. See Holly Etchegary et al., "The
Influence of Experiential Knowledge on Prenatal Screening and
Testing Decisions," *Genetic Testing* 12, no. 1 (2008), 115--24; Pat
Hoddinott and Roisin Pill, "Qualitative Study of Decisions about
Infant Feeding among Women in East End of London," *BMJ* 318, no.
7175 (1999), 30--34; and, for the concepts of "embodied" and
"empathetic" knowledge, Emily K. Abel and C. H. Browner, "Selective
Compliance with Biomedical Authority and the Uses of Experiential
Knowledge," in *Pragmatic Women and Body Politics*, ed. Margaret
Lock and Patricia A. Kaufert (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 310--26. Such present-day studies should not be read
back directly to the antebellum period, however, as other research
suggests that contemporary patients place far more credit in
biomedical technology and "authoritative knowledge" than previous
generations. See C. H. Browner and Nancy Press, "The Production of
Authoritative Knowledge in American Prenatal Care," *Medical
Anthopology Quarterly* 10, no. 2 (June 1996), 141--56.
[^12]: WLG to Elizabeth Pease, May 3, 1848, LWLG 3:555ff; Pease to WLG,
November 12, 1848, BPL, Ms.A.1.2.18.39. See also WLG to George W.
Benson, May 17, 1848, LWLG 5:558. On Wright's health, see Pease to
Nathaniel P. Rogers, September 13, 1843, Haverford Collection 806,
Box 1.
[^13]: Wendell Phillips to Elizabeth Pease, August 29, 1847, BPL,
Ms.A.1.2.17.66; Phillips to Pease, November 21, 1852, BPL,
Ms.A.1.2.21.124; WLG to MWC, July 19, 1848, LWLG 3:568.
[^14]: Mary Grew to Helen E. Garrison, July 23, 1846, BPL,
Ms.A.1.2.16.75; Edmund Quincy to Richard Davis Webb, January 30,
1844, BPL, Mss. 960, vol. 1, no. 5. For examples of testimonials in
the *Water Cure Journal*, see "Dr. Ruggles' Hydropathic Experience,"
*Water Cure Journal*, April 1848; James Caleb Jackson, "Past and
Present Experience of a Hydropathy," *Water Cure Journal*, January
1850. On the Brown family's disagreements over the water cure, see
John Brown Jr. to John Brown, September 18, 1849; Jason Brown to
John Brown Jr., August 17, 1849; and Thomas Thomas to John Brown
Jr., September 4, 1849, all at Ohio Historical Society. The British
reformer Richard Cobden likewise regarded hydropathy as a
"*superstition*" even though his wife and brother-in-law were firm
believers. See Richard Cobden to Joseph Sturge, February 3, 1857,
British Library Add. 43722, f. 204.
[^15]: DeKroyft quotes are from her *A Place in Thy Memory* (New York:
J. F. Trow, 1850), pp. 135--37. I am quoting from the edition of the
book contained in the North American Women's Letters and Diaries
Database published by Alexander Street Press. Re: Abby Kelley's
decision, see Abby Kelley to Wendell Phillips, July 28, 1858,
Phillips Papers (556/4). See also Dorothy Sterling, *Ahead of Her
Time*, 277--78.
[^16]: DeKroyft, *A Place in Thy Memory*, 145--48.