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The theory and practice of the water cure

Jane M. Adams

in Healing with water: English spas and the water cure, 1840-1960

This chapter explores the changing theories put forward to explain the therapeutic effects of water and investigates how it was applied in various treatments. It discusses the routines and practices ... More

This chapter explores the changing theories put forward to explain the therapeutic effects of water and investigates how it was applied in various treatments. It discusses the routines and practices for ‘taking the waters’ at spas in the early nineteenth century and assesses the impact of the new therapeutic methods introduced by hydropathy in the 1840s. Despite antipathy towards unorthodox hydropathists in the mid-nineteenth century by the 1890s hydropathic techniques were integrated into orthodox medicine through the specialty of balneology and climatology. Medical hydrology became accepted as part of the rational therapeutics of scientific medicine. Despite increased emphasis on technique and technology water cures continued to emphasise the importance of wider regimen. (112)Less

“He Is Psychotic and Always Will Be”: Racial Ambivalence and the Limits of Therapeutic Optimism, 1903–1937

Martin Summers

in Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions

This chapter continues an examination of the superintendency of William Alanson White but offers a more granular discussion of how ideas about racial difference shaped the clinical encounter in the ... More

This chapter continues an examination of the superintendency of William Alanson White but offers a more granular discussion of how ideas about racial difference shaped the clinical encounter in the era of dynamic psychiatry. Specifically, it looks at how Saint Elizabeths’ staff applied particular somatic “therapies”—including seclusion, restraint, and hydrotherapy—to black female, white female, black male, and white male patients. It also argues that the clinical staff’s limited psychotherapeutic engagement with African American patients was further undermined by two things. One was the psychiatrists’ assumptions about the inaccessibility of the black psyche—either because of the absolute cultural foreignness or natural duplicity of African Americans. The other was their tendency to prioritize black patients’ rehabilitation as laborers. Finally, the chapter looks at the quotidian ways that patients exerted their agency in the clinical encounter by resisting medical surveillance and institutional management.Less

Rebuilding Pittsburgh (1845–46)

Richard Haw

in Engineering America: The Life and Times of John A. Roebling

The Great Fire of Pittsburgh devastated the city, in the process consuming the old wooden Smithfield Street Bridge, leaving only the piers in the river. With John already at work on a similar ... More

The Great Fire of Pittsburgh devastated the city, in the process consuming the old wooden Smithfield Street Bridge, leaving only the piers in the river. With John already at work on a similar structure across the river, and with the city desperate to rebuild, John received the contract to rebuild the Monongahela crossing almost immediately. His Allegheny Aqueduct was opened afterward to universal acclaim, after which he retreated to Saxonburg to recuperate and plunged wholeheartedly into his next big obsession: the water cure. Despite devoting much of his life to science, John was always distrustful of doctors and traditional medicine, and he relied increasingly on his own theories and practices, many of which we would now call deluded at best. Thankfully, John soon returned to what he was undoubtedly good at and set about rebuilding the Monongahela Bridge. Again, the effort was immense and the results spectacular. The bridge was finished and opened the following spring, by which time John was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost suspension bridge engineers in the world.Less

The Rise of Nervous Illness

Edward Shorter

in How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown

It is much better, people think, for the nerves than the mind to be ill. The nerves are physical structures, and heal in the way that all organs of the body heal naturally. Disorders of the mind ... More

It is much better, people think, for the nerves than the mind to be ill. The nerves are physical structures, and heal in the way that all organs of the body heal naturally. Disorders of the mind are frightening because they are so intangible, and, we think, may well lead to insanity rather than recovery. From time out of mind, people have privileged nervous illness over mental illness. From time out of mind, societies have had expressions for the varieties of frets, anxieties, and dyspepsias to which the flesh is heir. In France and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one term was “vapours,” a reference from humoral medicine to supposed exhalations of the viscera that would rise in the body to affect the brain. A major apostle was London physician John Purcell, writing in 1702, of “those who have laboured long under this distemper, [who] are oppressed with a dreadful anguish of mind and a deep melancholy, always reflecting on what can perplex, terrify, and disorder them most, so that at last they think their recovery impossible, and are very angry with those who pretend there is any hopes of it.” He emphasized melancholia and anguish, and for him the “vapours” were something more than a mild attack of the frets. But this was not for everyone. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, now 60 and living in exile in Italy, described to her estranged husband in 1749 Italian health care arrangements, and how physicians visited rich and poor alike. “This last article would be very hard if we had as many vapourish ladies as in England, but those imaginary ills are entirely unknown here. When I recollect the vast fortunes raised by doctors amongst us [in England], and the eager pursuit after every new piece of quackery that is introduced, I cannot help thinking there is a fund of credulity in mankind . . . and the money formerly given to monks for the health of the soul is now thrown to doctors for the health of the body, and generally with as little real prospect of success.” Less

Fatigue

Edward Shorter

in How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown

Let us try to unpack nervous disease. What does it consist of? For one thing, most of the patients are tired, even exhausted, and one of the main components of the nervous picture is fatigue. ... More

Let us try to unpack nervous disease. What does it consist of? For one thing, most of the patients are tired, even exhausted, and one of the main components of the nervous picture is fatigue. Today, psychiatrists do not think of fatigue as a terribly important symptom. After such obvious sources as iron deficiency have been eliminated— and it has been determined that the patient is not suffering from one of those quasidelusional disorders such as “chronic fatigue syndrome”—most clinicians would be inclined to ascribe fatigue to depression. For patients, however, fatigue remains a hugely important matter. A study of Stirling County in Canada’s Atlantic provinces in 1970 found that only 6% of psychiatrists considered fatigue to be serious; by contrast, people in the community reported “feeling weak all over” as one of the most serious symptoms among a list of 46. In hospital charts today it is not uncommon to see the acronym “TATT,” Tired All The Time. The complaints of the fatigued and weary echo across the ages. In 1712 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, en route in a journey, complained to a correspondent, “This is what writing tackle the Inn affords, and my head and hand are both disorder’d with fatigue, both of mind and body.” Lest psychological fatigue be thought mainly a women’s complaint, one of the “grand asthenics” of all time was Parisian novelist Marcel Proust, who, around the turn of the century, was so droopy with fatigue—his medical father had written a book on the subject! —that he barely made it from his bedchamber. His correspondence from 1909, for example, mentions fatigue throughout. On Friday, November 26, after his guests had departed, “I set about demolishing what I had written. And over my heart, fatigued from this absence of repose, voilà the fog that rolls in again. It’s about three in the afternoon and [another nervous] crisis seems to be starting up.” Whatever period or social class is under discussion, fatigue simply tumbles from the page. Less

VI

in The Struggle of My Life: Autobiography of Swami Sahajanand Saraswati

This chapter deals with the major events in Sahajanand’s life during 1920–7. In 1920, he met Gandhi at Patna and became involved in the freedom struggle. He attended the Nagpur Congress and plunged ... More

This chapter deals with the major events in Sahajanand’s life during 1920–7. In 1920, he met Gandhi at Patna and became involved in the freedom struggle. He attended the Nagpur Congress and plunged into the Non-cooperation Movement. He was imprisoned and spent time in various jails. It was also during this period that other Brahmins challenged Bhumihars to perform all rituals on their own. Swami accepted that challenge and prompted Bhumihars to take up Purohiti work. He also wrote a voluminous work called Karma Kalap in Hindi to facilitate this, and founded the Sitaram Ashram to promote Sanskrit learning among Bhumihar boys in 1927. He started a journal called Lokasangraha but handed it over to his co-worker Yamuna Karjee to pursue a new venture.Less