ABSTRACT
In the above description of Bray in 1903, the town’s reputation as a health resort is promoted with reference to the presence of formal medical infrastructures and the ‘powerful tonic’ of the sea-water in curative baths. In addition, proximity to the city is identified as a significant element in case of medical emergencies. Subsequent health narratives at the seaside have focused more on holistic and embodied aspects of exercise, fitness and more recently, on the potentially anti-therapeutic dangers of careless beach behaviours (Lenček and Bosker, 1998; Collins and Kearns, 2007). Yet older watering-place identities and the development of the sea-bathing resort as a therapeutic setting go back to the mid eighteenth century and it is from this period up to the 1930s that the chapter primarily focuses.
