Why Would Anybody Drink Water That Tastes of Iron? Because a Doctor Said So

The regime was medical rather than recreational and was taken extremely seriously. A visitor consulted a physician on arrival, was prescribed a specific quantity of a specific water to be drunk at specific times, usually early in the morning and in considerable volume, and followed a programme of bathing, exercise, diet and rest over several weeks. The waters at each place had a distinct mineral composition, and elaborate claims were made about which conditions each suited, with iron-bearing springs prescribed for weakness, sulphurous ones for skin complaints and saline ones for digestion. Much of the effect was presumably rest, exercise and abstinence from ordinary life rather than the water.

The requirements produced a recognisable set of buildings:

• •A pump room where the water was dispensed and visitors gathered
• •Baths, frequently elaborate and sometimes built over Roman remains
• •Assembly rooms for dancing, cards and conversation
• •A theatre and a concert hall
• •Long covered walks for exercise in any weather
• •Terraces and crescents of lodging houses for visitors

The medical purpose provided a reason for a very particular social institution, and contemporaries understood this perfectly well. A spa gathered people of comparable means from a wide area for several weeks with little to do, which made it the principal marriage market of the eighteenth century and the place where business and political connections were formed. Rules of conduct were codified, most famously by Beau Nash at Bath, who regulated dress, dancing and behaviour and made the town fashionable. The mixing of ranks was greater than in ordinary society, which caused anxiety and which novelists exploited. A great deal of English fiction is set in these towns for exactly that reason.

The springs that made these places were genuinely unusual and the chemistry explains why they were noticed. Water passing through rock dissolves whatever that rock supplies, so a spring emerging from iron-bearing strata carries dissolved iron, one from gypsum carries sulphate, and one rising from great depth may be hot and heavily mineralised. Sulphurous springs smell strongly of rotten eggs, which is unmistakable and which nobody would drink casually, so their use required a reason. Some waters are naturally carbonated where carbon dioxide from depth dissolves under pressure. Temperatures range from cold to uncomfortably hot. Those properties were obvious to anybody, long predate any medical theory, and are why the sites were used in Roman times and earlier.

The decline came from several directions over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Railways made seaside resorts accessible to the same visitors, and sea bathing was promoted on comparable medical grounds and was more agreeable. Medicine abandoned the underlying theory as understanding of disease improved, so prescriptions stopped. Continental spas remained in medical use far longer, and several European health systems still fund courses of treatment at them, which is why German and central European examples remained busy while British ones did not. Several British towns reinvented themselves as conference and retirement centres. The buildings survive because they were substantial, and pump rooms, baths and assembly rooms now serve entirely different purposes.

Visitors arrived on medical advice, consulted a physician and followed weeks of prescribed drinking, bathing, exercise and diet, which produced pump rooms, baths, assembly rooms and terraces of lodgings. The institution functioned as a marriage market and a place for forming connections, with conduct codified by figures such as Beau Nash at Bath. Railways, seaside resorts and improved medicine ended the British ones while continental systems still fund treatment.