ABSTRACT
Like alcohol, water has always had a therapeutic role in medicine: marine hydrotherapy and balneotherapy (spa baths in water with high mineral content) have been in western medicine since time immemorial. Taking the waters became big business in Europe, to the profit of spas, hotels, and doctors. The big revival of marine hydrotherapy or seaside cures took place in eighteenth-century England. The nineteenth-century word thalassotherapy describes the therapeutic use of seawater in a beach climate. Giving a treatment a Latin or especially a Greek name enhances its medical, financial, and, possibly, its therapeutic value. In 1791 John Coakley Lettsom founded the General Sea Bathing Infirmary in Margate, on the Isle of Thanet. Doctors scribbled learned treatises, the most famous being by Richard Russell (1687-1759), “the booster of Brighton,” as Roy Porter called him. Relying on the universal medical dogma of “no pain, no gain,” the doctrines of hydropathy became popular with the English elite.2 In Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion, “Dr Shirley, after his illness … declares … that coming to Lyme [Regis] for a month, did him more good than all the medicines he took; and that
being by the sea, always makes him feel young again.”3 The Germans had their establishments in the Baltic. In the second half of the nineteenth century marine cures spread in some Italian states and in France. Between 1847 and 1878 about 9000 persons were treated at a small hospital in Cette (Sète) in the Hérault. Forges and Saint-Malo also enjoyed the profits of marine cures, but it was Berck-sur-Mer in the Pas-de-Calais that rose to thalasso-therapeutic fame.4
