Spas

Spas dedicated to the promotion of health and well-being are found across the world. Originally their function was based on therapeutic and pleasurable usage of thermal and mineral springs for bathing and drinking; they now are highly commercialized institutions playing a key role in tourism around the world, a subject that is still underresearched. The term spa is also widely used to refer to any facility that markets itself as beneficial to health, beauty, and relaxation. Many early modern spas originated in pilgrimage sites and a belief in the healing power of their therapeutic landscapes, and the transformative nature of the spa experience continues to play a part in spa culture. In the eighteenth century, many European and American spas functioned as summer health and leisure resorts for the elite classes, contributing to the spread of a market economy. Famous eighteenth-century spas included Bath in England, Karlsbad in Bohemia, Baden in Austria, Pyrmont in Germany, and the Virginia Springs in America. In the nineteenth century, “the golden age of the spas,” they continued to be sites of fashionable display and entertainment. Spas were important meeting places and are studied for their contribution to the spread of a commercialized [Page 1360]leisure culture, processes of class formation, and the construction of regional and national identities.

Spa visits were recommended for all kinds of ailments, including gout, rheumatism, scrofula, and phthisis (tuberculosis), and for complaints associated with ill-disciplined and overindulgent lifestyles. In the nineteenth century, investigations into the properties of mineral waters led to a more disciplined usage and in continental Europe, where greater state control existed, there was intervention and reform in the way the spas were run. The fashion for sea bathing and air encouraged the development of seaside spas while the influence of Romanticism encouraged inland spas to present themselves as sites of natural healing and scenic beauty. Medicalization of spa culture led to great specialization and diversification as climate theory and hydropathy (“the water cure”) gained ground. High-altitude resorts for respiratory disorders, particularly tuberculosis, were established from the 1870s, and the expansion of tourism in the 1880s encouraged renovation and development in traditional spas. Wiesbaden and Baden Baden in Germany, Aix-les-Bains and Vichy in France, Meran in Austria, and Saratoga Springs in the United States developed into modern health and leisure resorts for the new bourgeois classes. Fashionable spas continued to attract an international and cosmopolitan clientele (though gambling was forbidden in German and Austrian resorts). Spa cures were popular for patients suffering from eating-related and nervous disorders, such as obesity, neurasthenia, and hysteria, which were attributed to the excesses and stresses of modern life.

Spas were (and still are) businesses, the financial success of which depends on attitudes toward the body, the current state of medicine, natural-healing philosophies, and the promotion of their treatments as antidotes to modern lifestyles. Environmental improvements heightened the contrast between tranquil spa parks and ugly, polluted modern cities. Spa establishments distinguished themselves from their competitors by promoting particular treatments—homeopathy; grape, milk, and whey cures; wine, mud, and herbal and hay baths. Modern treatments incorporated electrotherapy and gymnastics. Like the spas of today, they benefited from new health and life reform movements and the opportunities these create for the promotion of products, often associated with particular cults such as Kneippism (associated with Worishofen in Bavaria) and the sale and export of bottled mineral waters.

...