American Healing Waters

Prof. Jonathan Paul de Vierville, Ph.D., L.P.C.,
L.M.S.W.-A.C.P., T.R.M.T.
Alamo Plaza Spa at the Menger Hotel, San Antonio, Texas

Since the beginning of history, people have resorted to springs, baths, and spas for the therapeutic effects and power of their healing waters. Not so in America today. Few Americans go to spas and health resorts anymore for their waters. Almost no one knows where the cool springs and thermal waters are, let alone how to use them. Now, at the end of the millennium, the once active healing springs run neglected, uninhabited, and unremembered.

On the other hand, culture directly projects its dominant ideas and values into its material resources, especially the fundamental life-giving and healing elements of the waters. An historical overview and chronological examination of America's healing springs, baths, spas, and health resorts, therefore, offers a significant and broad approach for viewing American culture. As historian Siegfried Giedion observed a half-century ago,

The bath and its purposes have held different meanings for different ages. The manner in which a civilization integrates bathing within its life, as well as the type of bathing it prefers, yields searching insight into the inner nature of the period.

The role that bathing plays within a culture reveals the culture's attitude toward human relaxation. It is a measure of how far individual well-being is regarded as an indispensable part of community life.

When Giedion wrote about "the bath and its purposes," he referred two types of regenerative processes. One was individual, the other social. Individual bathing is a private hygienic act of body care known as an ablution. The other type of regenerative process is "social bathing," a receptive, relaxed, and restorative activity that incorporated what Giedion referred to as the "broad ideal: total regeneration" and embodied "well-being for the whole man." "Total regeneration" was a sociable and holistic system, usually therapeutic. "Total regeneration" came primarily from the ritual practice of "taking the waters"--both by drinking and bathing--at places called spas.

Social bathing as a means for "total regeneration" was an important cultural process practiced by Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Minoans, Greeks, and Romans whenever they sought health and relief from their pain and diseases. During the Middle Ages, Charlemagne's Aachen and Bonaventura's Poretta developed as important social bathing and healing places around thermal springs. In the Renaissance era Paracelsus' mountain mineral springs at Paeffers, Switzerland and towns like Spa, Belgium, Baden-Baden, Germany, and Bath, England, grew up around natural thermal waters considered healing.

Long before Spanish explorers searched for legendary fountains and European colonists settled the New World, Native Americans bathed collectively in thermal mineral springs for physical health, spiritual well-being, and social regeneration. Later, colonists built log huts and wooden tubs near the wilderness springs and natural philosophers analyzed the waters for their chemical and medicinal virtues. Eighteenth century scientists and physicians reported their observations, conducted experiments, and collected testimonials; they also constructed medical theories based upon the natural and reasonable order thought to exist within the healing waters.

During the early 19th century, romantic and reform-minded Nature-seekers traveled to distant springs, where they drank and bathed and totally immersed themselves in hot and cold mineral waters. As the nation grew westward, pioneering medical men analyzed newly discovered springs and constructed elaborate scientific classification systems based upon geography, climatology, mineralogy, and geology. The medical establishment employed medicinal waters and different climates for prescribing balneotherapeutics (bath therapies) and climatotherapeutics (climate therapies) at distant springs and mountain resorts. A newly developed scientific hydrotherapy provided systematic physiological treatments for privileged city patients. For the masses of poor stuck in the crowd cities, free public baths offered periodic cleansing.

Discoveries, inventions, and events in the early 20th century dramatically changed America's attitude toward its healing waters and spas. Earlier recognition of germs and bacteria revolutionized the way medicine understood and treated disease. Scientific clinics and public hospitals replaced natural watering places and spas. Spa operators, in an effort to retain their health-seeking patrons, began promoting luxury accommodations and advertised all manner of therapeutic claims. Organized American medicine, however, lost confidence in healing waters, because the new man-made medicaments provided quicker and stronger remedies for many illnesses. Simultaneously, technological advances brought increased comforts and conveniences, and modern American consumer culture created a new demand for haste and speed. Modern medicine responded similarly with its swift techniques and fast-acting chemical remedies.

Continued discoveries in biochemical and physical sciences, combined with the chaos of World Wars I and II, accelerated the need for medical research, especially for physical therapy and rehabilitation. Medical professionals and societies conducted several national surveys of spas and health resorts but failed to establish medical school training programs for spa therapy, hydrotherapy, or university balneological institutes. Modern American medicine, with a few exceptions, disregarded and abandoned America's springs, spas, and health resorts. This was not entirely the fault of the medical profession. Modern American patients were anything but patient; they wanted fast treatment with quick results from easy-to-take medicines.

In part because of limited professional interest and government financial support, appreciation and therapeutic use of American healing waters and spas declined as moderate medicine became more specialized and technical. Standardized health care--like the atom--split, separated, and re-defined itself into isolated and fragmented fields. Modern medicine became an assembly of specialized techniques and devices designed to manage parts of the body like parts of a machine.

While the rise of modern medical specialization provided significant diagnostic advancements, it also contributed greatly to increased costs and a health care insurance system that emphasized reactive rather than preventive medicine. This was unfortunate, especially at a time when health and disease became increasingly identified with behavior and lifestyles that produced chronic stress, pain, and disease. Modern medicine revolutionized specialized treatments of diseases with new antibiotics and strong chemotherapy, high-tech surgery, and transplants, but important health needs, like care for chronic illnesses, and the elderly, continued.

These health care needs are nothing new, but like Nature repeat with each generation. Nature is basically repetitious, so are her healing waters. The therapeutic effects of the healing waters remain the same today as those from ancient times. When traditional spa therapies and health resort medicine are compared with modern clinical hydrotherapeutic procedures, researchers find similar therapeutic benefits like relaxation, prevention, restoration, recreation, and especially "total regeneration." The healing waters have not changed. What changed was the cultural vision, especially its perceptions, values, and ideas mirrored and reflected in the healing waters.

Today, unfortunately, these traditional natural therapeutic spa practices and health resort medicine are largely forgotten, their hidden histories, however, still linger in dark attics and damp cellars, where old file cabinets contain a wealth of helpful information ready for rediscovery. Also ready for rediscovery are the holistic and integrated regenerative processes--what Giedion called "total regeneration." These once well-established natural spa and health resort processes of "taking-the-waters" can provide a way for our speed-driven culture to reconnect with Nature's basic elements and environmental limits, and most importantly, with humanity's healthful rhythms and traditional rituals.

In recent years, the space age changed our cultural vision and now provides us with a global perspective of our planet floating through the black cosmic sea like a shimmering blue drop of mineral water. As astronaut Loren Acton of the Challenger 8 flight of July 1985 said, "When you look out the other way toward the stars you realize it's an awful long way to the next watering hole."

This dissertation is about American watering holes. It is an historical overview of America's healing springs and natural spas and the people who used them for preserving health and treating disease. It is also a review of important medical professionals who successfully put the natural waters to therapeutic use. In the following pages, I recollect and reconnect along a timeline these forgotten spa practitioners and their healing water theories and methods. My purpose is to reacquaint Americans with this lengthy spa history and tradition found at major springs and acknowledge significant spa practitioners. In this way I hope to help Americans revision and reestablish spas in the future to their rightful cultural pace offering a "broader ideal: total regeneration."

Before we can look forward into the future, however, we must look back into a time long before America, when ancient people drank and bathed at the healing water holes. This was a time when spirits inhabited the depths of the sacred springs and people worshipped and revered them greatly.