Abstract
Along with homoeopathy, mesmerism and herbalism, hydropathy ranks among the most famous of the so-called alternative medical practices of the nineteenth century. And not without reason. In 1891, Britain had sixty-three hydros of substantial size and reputation, catering to a largely middle class and marginally aristocratic clientele.1 In addition, there were many smaller hydros patronised by sections of the working class. Among those who haunted the more fashionable hydros were many of Britain’s ailing intellectuals and artistic luminaries: Charles Darwin, for instance, took several courses of treatment during 1858 whilst completing The Origin of Species. Another regular patron, Alfred Lord Tennyson, corrected the proofs of The Princess’ while undergoing hydropathy in Birmingham in 1847; a year later, at a hydro in Malvern, he completed the first draft of ‘In Memoriam’.2
The wealth [health] of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’.
(Marx, Capital, vol.1, chapter 1)
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Notes
Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882, ed Nora Barlow (London, 1958), pp. 117, 122 and 240; C. Tennyson, A. Tennyson by his Grandson C. Tennyson (London, 1968), pp. 7, 218, 232, 234 and 268. Tennyson apparently had an interest in mesmerism fostered while staying at Malvern in 1852; ibid., p. 268.
Useful, however, are R. Price, ‘Hydropathy in England 1840–70’, Medical History, 25 (1981), pp. 269–80; and B. Aspinwall, ‘Social Catholicism and Health: Dr and Mrs Thomas Low Nichols in Britain’, in W.J. Sheils (ed.), The Church and Healing: studies in Church history (Oxford, 1982), pp. 249–70. The most informative source remains that by the London hydropathist Richard Metcalfe, The Rise and Progress of Hydropathy in England and Scotland (London, 1906; 2nd edn, 1912).
For example, Matlock Bath, two miles from Matlock, had been a fashionable eighteenth-century spa. See James Pilkington, A View of the Present State of Derbyshire (Derby, 1789), vol.2, pp. 257–75.
Hence at Matlock Bath by 1849, ‘persons of quality’ were driven away by the crowds of working-class ‘trippers’ from Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Lancashire. See Benjamin Bryan, Matlock: manor and parish, historical and descriptive (London, 1903), p. 222.
See Alfred Wallis (ed.), Bemroses’ Guide to Derbyshire (Irongate, Derby, 1878), pp. 17–28.
On the United Free Methodists, see D. A. Barton, ‘Aspects of Nonconformity in Six Derbyshire Towns, 1850–1914; a comparative study of Derby, Chesterfield, Bakewell, Matlock, Glossop, and Belper’, MA thesis, University of Sheffield, 1981, 2 vols.
See R. Hall, ‘Economy and Society in the Derbyshire Peak District, 1861’, Derbyshire Archeological Journal, 98 (1978), pp. 73–83.
See G.E. Hogarth, ‘Derby and Derbyshire Elections 1837–47’, Derbyshire Archeological Journal, 95 (1975), pp. 48–59; and E. Fearn, ‘Reform Movements in Derby and Derbyshire’, MA thesis, University of Manchester, 1964.
See Joseph Buckley, Matlock Bank, Derbyshire, as it was and is … with a short sketch of the personal history of John Smedley (Wicksworth, [1867]), republished as Recollections of the late John Smedley of Matlock, and the Water Cure with an Introduction by David Barton (Matlock, 1973).
For his religious views, see J. Smedley, Remarks on the Deficient Mode in which the Bible is read in the Church of England, and also by the Nonconformists (London, n.d. [c1860]); idem, Historical Sketch of the Ancient and Modern Church in Britain (Derby, 1854).
On Wilson (1805–67), see Metcalfe (note 3), and Brian Stanley Smith, A History of Malvern (Leicester, 1964), p. 195; on Gully (1808–83) see Dictionary of National Biography.
Smedley, Practical Hydropathy (3rd edn, 1858), p. 16.
For an explication and further sources, see Roger Cooter, ‘The Power of the Body’, in B. Barnes and S. Shapin (eds), Natural Order: historical studies of scientific culture (Beverly Hills/London, 1979), pp. 73–92. Cooter identifies nineteenth-century physiology as ‘proto-functionalist’ and as effecting a popular rationalisation of bourgeois values and ideology. The politically reactionary quality of nineteenth-century physiology is explored in L.S. Jacyna, ‘The Physiology of Mind, the Unity of Nature and the Moral Order in Victorian Thought’, British Journal for the History of Science, 14 (1981), pp. 109–32. See also Charles E. Rosenberg, ‘Scientific Theories and Social Thought’, in B. Barnes (ed.), Sociology of Science, Selected Readings (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1972), pp. 292–305.
Smedley, Practical Hydropathy (3rd edn, London [1858]), p. 20.
Ibid., p. 16.
Ibid., p. 36.
Ibid., p. 83.
Ibid. See also E.J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1969), pp. 123 ff.
Smedley, Practical Hydropathy (3rd edn, 1858), p. 243.
‘Smedley’s Hydropathic Establishment, Matlock’, Prospectus (1853), Matlock Local History Library.
Smedley, Practical Hydropathy, (15th edn, London, [1877]), pp. 180–1.
Ibid., preface.
Ibid., (3rd edn, 1858), p. 68.
Ibid., (15th edn, 1877), Introduction.
Ibid., (3rd edn, 1858), p. 65.
Smedley, Practical Hydropathy (3rd edn, 1858), p. 475.
See Smedley, Strikes (1872), collected correspondence with the Manchester Guardian (Derby Central Library). Smedley boasted of never having had a strike at his factory, and suggested that industrial unrest would disappear from society as a whole if the ‘natural’ order of things was established.
There is a plan of Smedley’s Hydropathic Establishment in the Matlock Local History Library. For ideology in medical architecture, see the relevant papers in A.D. King (ed.), Buildings and Society (London, 1980), and John D. Thompson and Grace Goldin, The Hospital: A Social and Architectural History (London/New Haven, 1975).
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© 1988 Roger Cooter
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Rees, K. (1988). Water as a Commodity: Hydropathy in Matlock. In: Cooter, R. (eds) Studies in the History of Alternative Medicine. St Antony’s/Macmillan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19606-7_2
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