ABSTRACT
To a modern reader the term ‘cult of health’ is not likely to be taken literally, conjuring up images of obsessive adherents of jogging, aerobics and health food rather than religious worship of a real deity called Health. Post-classical images of the goddess herself include the rather shadowy figure receiving libations in Reynolds’ portrait of Mrs Peter Beckford (1782, Lady Lever Art Gallery), a self-consciously intellectualised product of the Enlightenment, ranking alongside the abstract goddesses Liberty and Reason of revolutionary France (Warner 1985: 267-93). In nineteenthcentury public sculpture, the figure of Health, always shown as a young woman with a snake, likewise appears in contexts which emphasise her allegorical nature. The monument in the central court of the Founder’s Building at Royal Holloway, University of London, depicts Thomas Holloway and his wife supported by a base decorated with four seated female figures, each representing an aspect of Holloway’s philanthropy, which is more explicitly described in the inscription: the college would
develop young ladies’ education with such skills as Reading and Writing, while Holloway’s Charity also provided a sanatorium nearby, represented by Health. Health is recognisable by her attributes of a snake and patera, following an iconography established as early as the beginning of the fourth century BC with statues such as the Hope Hygieia (Figure 6.1). The snake again identifies Health as the entirely appropriate occupant of the tholos of
St Bernard’s Well, a spa-water spring provided ‘for the benefit of the citizens of Edinburgh’ by a nineteenth-century philanthropist beside the Water of Leith in Edinburgh.
