Abstract
Scribner notices that while modern science generally equates consuming water with health and alcohol with illness, eighteenth-century Britons hardly relied upon such dyads. Rather, these two consumables were inverse, reciprocal, and competitive, often all at the same time. Alcohol, mineral water, taverns, and spas must be understood as homogenous rather than heterogenous. Labelled as ‘intoxicants’ by eighteenth-century physicians, mineral water and alcohol might do as much harm as good if not consumed correctly. Ordered and classified according to strength, certain mineral and alcoholic ‘liquors’ cured certain ailments. All, however, must be taken in moderation. Scribner shows that what was then a social debate often ran counter-current to the very advice that physicians had been pushing on the public for the past century.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
They still are not. The Superior Bathhouse Brewery in Hot Springs, Arkansas, claims to be the first brewery to utilize thermal spring water as their main ingredient (see ‘Superior Bathhouse Brewery Website’, online).
Works Cited
Primary Sources
Addison, Joseph. 1711. Spectator (10): March 12.
Baynard, Edward. 1715. Psychrolousia, or, the History of Cold Bathing: Both Ancient and Modern, Part Two. London: William Innys.
Beddoes, Thomas. 1793. Observations on the Nature and Cure of Calculus, Sea Scurvy, Consumption, Catarrh, and Fever. London: J. Murray.
Bergman, Torbern. 1784 [1779]. Physical and Chemical Essays, vol. 1, trans. Edmund Cullen. London: J. Murray.
Blackmore, Richard. 1726. A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours: Orr, Hypocondriacal and Hysterical Affections, with Three Discourses on the Nature and Cure of the Cholick, Melancholy, and Palsies, 2nd ed. London: J. Pemberton.
Boswell, James. 1837. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, vol. 3, ed. George Birkbeck Hill. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Boswell, James. 1950. Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company.
Cheyne, George. 1720. Essay on the Gout, with an Account of the Nature and Qualities of Bath Water. London: G. Strahan.
Cheyne, George. 1733. The English Malady: Or, a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds. London: Strahan.
Cheyne, George. 1736. Two Discourses, Shewing the Fatal Consequences of the Habitual Drinking of Distilled Spirituous Liquors. London: J. Roberts.
de Chastellux, Marquis. 1827. Travels in North America, in the Years 1780, 1781, and 1782. New York: White, Gallaher, & White.
Defoe, Daniel. 1962. A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, vol. 2, ed. G.D.H. Cole and D.C. Browning. London: Everyman.
Franklin, Benjamin. 1961. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 2, January 1, 1735, Through December 31, 1744, ed. Leonard W. Labaree. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Franklin, Benjamin. 1987. Writings. New York: The Library of America.
Goldsmith, Oliver. 1966. The Life of Richard Nash. In The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, vol. 3, ed. A. Friedman. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hales, Stephen. 1739. Philosophical Experiments: Containing Useful, and Necessary Instructions for Such as Undertake Long Voyages at Sea… London: W. Innys and R. Manby.
Johnson, Samuel. 1785. A Dictionary of the English Language. London: J.F. and C. Rivington.
Layard, Daniel Peter. 1767. An Account of the Somersham Water, in the County of Huntingdon. London: Daniel Peter Layard.
Lewis, William. 1784. An Experimental History of the Materia Medica, or of the Natural and Artificial Substances Made Use of in Medicine. London: J. Johnson.
Linden, Diederick Wessel. 1752. A Treatise on the Origin, Nature and Virtues of Chalybeat Waters, and Natural Hot Baths. London: T. Osborne.
Linden, Diederick Wessel. 1768. A Medicinal and Experimental History and Analysis of Hanlys-Spa. London: John Everingham.
Monro, Donald. 1770. A Treatise on Mineral Waters, vol. 1. London: D. Wilson and G. Nicol.
Priestly, Joseph. 1772. Directions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air; In Order to Communicate to It the Peculiar Spirit and Virtues of Pyrmont Water, and Other Mineral Waters of a Similar Nature. London: J. Johnson.
Pringle, John. 1764 [1752]. Observations on the Diseases of the Army, 4th ed. London: A. Millar.
Prior, Matthew. 1835. The Poetical Works of Matthew Prior, vol. 2. London: William Pickering.
Ruddy, John. 1757. A Methodical Synopsis of Mineral Waters. London: William Johnston.
Shaw, Peter. 1726. A New Practice of Physic, vol. 2. London: J. Osborn and T. Longman.
Short, Thomas. 1734. The Natural Experimental and Medicinal History of the Mineral Waters… London: F. Gyles.
Smythson, Hugh. 1785. The Compleat Family Physician; Or, Universal Medical Repository. London: Harrison and Co.
Steele, Richard. 1829. The Guardian and the Tatler, Complete in One Volume. London: Jones and Co.
Sutherland, Alex. 1764. An Attempt to Ascertain and Extend the Virtues of Bath and Bristol Waters by Experiments and Cases, 2nd ed. London: W. Frederick and S. Leake.
Trotter, Thomas. 1804. An Essay, Medical, Philosophical, and Chemical, on Drunkenness and Its Effects on the Human Body. London: T.N. Longman and O. Rees, originally submitted as a dissertation in 1788.
Wilson, Thomas. 1736. Distilled Spirituous Liquors the Bane of the Nation. London: J. Roberts.
Secondary Sources
Borsay, Anne. 1999. Medicine and Charity in Georgian Bath: A Social History of the General Infirmary, c. 1739–1830. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Borsay, Peter. 2000. Health and Leisure Resorts 1700–1840. In The Cambridge Urban History of Britain Vol. II, 1540–1840, ed. Peter Clark, 775–803. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Borsay, Peter. 2012. Town or Country? British Spas and the Urban-Rural Interface. Journal of Tourism History 4 (2) (August): 155–169.
Bridenbaugh, Carl. 1946. Baths and Watering Places of Colonial America. William and Mary Quarterly 3 (April): 151–181.
Brodie, Allan. 2014. Scarborough in the 1730s—Spa, Sea, Sex. In Mineral Springs Resorts in Global Perspective: Spa Histories, ed. John K. Walton, 15–44. London, Routledge.
Bryson, Anna. 1998. From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Clark, Peter. 1983. The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200–1830. New York: Longman Inc.
Clark, Peter. 1988. The ‘Mother Gin’ Controversy in the Early Eighteenth Century. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 38 (December): 63–84.
Coley, Noel G. 1982. Physicians and the Chemical Analysis of Mineral Waters in Eighteenth-Century England. Medical History 26 (2) (April): 123–144.
Coley, Noel G. 1990. Physicians, Chemists, and the Analysis of Mineral Waters: ‘The Most Difficult Part of Chemistry’. In The Medical History of Waters and Spas, ed. Roy Porter, 67–81. London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine.
Cowan, Brian. 2005. Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Curl, James Stevens. 2010. Spas, Wells, & Pleasure-Gardens of London. London: Historical Publications.
de Baecque, Antoine. 2001. Representations of Body. In Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, vol. 1, ed. Michel Delon, 185. London, Routledge.
Drinker, Cecil K. 1937. Not So Long Ago; A Chronicle of Medicine and Doctors in Colonial Philadelphia, 1937. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ellis, Aytoun. 1956. The Penny Universities: A History of the Coffee-Houses. London: Secker and Warburg.
Hardy, Anne. 1984. Water and the Search for Public Health in London in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Medical History 28 (3) (July): 250–282.
Harley, David. 1990. Honour and Property: The Structure of Professional Disputes in Eighteenth-Century English Medicine. In The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, eds. Andrew Cunningham and Roger French, 138–164. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Hembry, Phyllis. 1990. The English Spa, 1560–1815: A Social History. London: Athlone Press.
Hirsh, Joseph. 1949. Enlightened Eighteenth-Century Views of the Alcohol Problem. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 4 (2) (Spring): 230–236.
Humphrey, Nicholas. 2001. Introduction: Altered States. Social Research 68 (3) (Fall): 585–587.
Jennings, Paul. 2016. A History of Drink and the English, 1500–2000. London: Routledge.
Levine, Harry G. 1978. The Discovery of Addiction: Changing Conceptions of Habitual Drunkenness in America. Journal of the Study of Alcohol 39 (1) (January): 43–57.
McIntyre, Sylvia. 1973. The Mineral Water Trade in the Eighteenth Century. Journal of Transport History, New Series 2 (February): 1–19.
Meacham, Sarah H. 2009. Every Home a Distillery: Alcohol, Gender, and Technology in the Colonial Chesapeake. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Nicholls, James. 2009. The Politics of Alcohol: A History of the Drink Question in England. Manchester: University of Manchester Press.
Oatsvall, Neil. 2019. Bottling Nature’s Elixir: The Mountain Valley Spring Water Company, Environment, Health, and Capitalism. The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 78 (1) (Spring): 1–31.
Porter, Roy. 1985. The Drinking Man’s Disease: The ‘Pre-history’ of Alcoholism in Georgian Britain. British Journal of Addiction 80 (4) (1985): 385–396.
Porter, Roy, ed. 1990. The Medical History of Waters and Spas. London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine.
Porter, Roy, ed. 1994. London: A Social History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Porter, Roy, ed. 1997. The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity. New York: W. W. Norton.
Rorabaugh, W.J. 1991. Alcohol in America. OAH Magazine of History 6 (2) (Fall): 17–19.
Salinger, Sharon V. 2002. Taverns and Drinking in Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Scribner, Vaughn. 2016. “The Happy Effects of These Waters”: Colonial American Mineral Spas and the British Civilizing Mission. Early American Studies 14 (3) (Summer): 409–449.
Scribner, Vaughn. 2019. Inn Civility: Urban Taverns and Early American Civil Society. New York: New York University Press.
Sydney, William Connor. 1891. England and the English in the Eighteenth Century: Chapters in the Social History of the Times, vol. 2. London: Ward & Downey.
Thomson, Thomas. 1812. History of the Royal Society, From Its Institution to the End of the Eighteenth Century. London: Robert Baldwin.
Tomory, Leslie. 2014. The Question of Water Quality in London’s New River in the Eighteenth Century. Social History of Medicine 27 (3) (July): 488–507.
Walford, Edward. 1870. Old and New London: A Narrative of Its History, Its People, and Its Places, vol. 5. London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin.
White, Jerry. 2012. London in the Eighteenth Century: A Great and Monstrous Thing. London: Vintage Books.
Withington, Phil. 2014. Introduction: Cultures of Intoxication. Past and Present 222 (Suppl. 9) (April): 9–33.
Website
Superior Bathhouse Brewery. https://www.superiorbathhouse.com (accessed October 26, 2020).
Acknowlegements
The author would especially like to thank Sophie Chiari and Samuel Cuisinier-Delorme for organizing the conference upon which this edited volume is based, and for their help throughout the entire process of publication. Special thanks also goes out to the conference’s participants, as well as the Department of History at the University of Central Arkansas, for travel funding.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Scribner, V. (2021). Drowning in Health: Murky Perceptions of Mineral Water and Alcohol in Eighteenth-Century Medical Literature and Social Mores. In: Chiari, S., Cuisinier-Delorme, S. (eds) Spa Culture and Literature in England, 1500-1800. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66568-5_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66568-5_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-66567-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-66568-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)