Healing Waters

Therapeutic Landscapes in Historic and Contemporary Ireland

Ronan Foley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317123422
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Bringing together a range of different place-studies, including holy wells, spa towns, Turkish baths and sweat-houses, sea-bathing and the modern spa, this book investigates associations between water, health, place and culture in Ireland. It is informed by a humanistic approach, showing how health and place are socially and culturally constructed and how health is embodied, experienced and enacted in place. In addition, the work argues that an understanding of health and place must also consider the historical, societal and cultural orthodoxies that shape and produce those places.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Water, Health and Place

As a child growing up in land-locked Laois, far from the ocean, the highlight of the year was the family trip to the seaside at Kilkee on the West Coast of Ireland. Like most families, we held an in-car competition as to who first saw the sea. My sisters always won, yet the first sight of the Atlantic brought with it a burst of excited feelings linked to the water and what we would do in the place. As an adult living by the banks of the Severn in Worcestershire, England, a typical Sunday walk along the river passed a small colony of shacks. These were informal and ephemeral homes to escaping Black Country factory workers, for whom Bewdley was the nearest place they could get their fix of nature and water. In both settings the power of water, maritime or fluvial, and place, constructed or temporary, combined to provide a simple, but affective sense of well-being for individuals, families and communities.

We all know that water is essential to life, we need to consume at least two litres a day to maintain that life while access to clean healthy water continues to be one of the most significant barriers to global health (Kingsley et al., 2009). Water has many other roles in everyday life and is endowed with particular qualities. This book focuses on one of those qualities, namely the ascribed healing power of water and its material expression in place. Human associations with water as physical healer are deeply embedded at a global level (Strang, 2004; Gerten, 2008). In particular these associations are expressed through and in geographical places, with springs, pools, rivers, lakes and the sea all associated with health-giving powers and constituting what may be termed therapeutic landscapes. Such landscapes are defined by Kearns and Gesler as; ‘places that have achieved lasting reputations for providing physical, mental and spiritual healing’ (1998, 8). The essential function of water as a life-preserving lubricant within the human body is also expressed at a more spiritual and elemental level in a wide number of religious and other-belief systems (Shaw and Francis, 2008). In such systems, rivers like the Ganga or lakes like Superior are believed to be the homes of the gods and as such, the guardians of life. In addition, special reverence is often held for those places where water courses begin, such as the source of the Indus at Mount Kailash in Tibet (Shackley, 2001).

Water’s ability to act as a metaphor for life, and by extension, health, is endless. In its mobile flow through the landscape, the course of a river is representative of the sinuous life-course experience of human health. In its often still presence as lake or pond, the therapeutic and calming natures of water are regularly invoked (Conradson, 2005a). As raging torrent, or wild-waved sea, the volatile and ambiguous nature of water is visible as an element of contestable health, capable of both good and harm (Corbin, 1994). In such meanings, ‘water has a nearly unlimited ability to carry metaphors’ (Illich, 1986). These are often expressed in homologous form such as immersions in ‘bodies of water’ that emphasize embodied and emotional connections between human and aquatic environments (Strang, 2004; Shaw and Francis, 2008). The body, itself an average of 60% water, can also be seen as a ‘permeable spatial form’, through which water is absorbed, stored, circulated and expelled (Curtis et al., 2009). Water’s symbolic and spiritual role within healing and well-being is also reflected in its utilization in a range of complementary, alternative and holistic practices across time and space (Williams, 1998; Heller et al., 2005). These reflect non-western and global understandings of health wherein metaphors of integration, balance and diversity are central tenets (Bergholdt, 2008).

There are a number of visible place expressions of water, with specific connections to health and healing that include springs, wells, seas, baths and spas. It is from such places within Ireland that this book draws its own inspiration and focus. Both natural and constructed, all of the forms, though often treated similarly, are of different provenance and meaning. The natural spring can be both emergent source and simple pool, while wells may be the pools which form at springs or become ‘domesticated’ through human agency. Sea-water helped create the coastal bathing resort and is used in modern practices of thalassotherapy as a literal ‘health from the sea’. Baths are constructed by humans in many forms for hygienic, spiritual, pleasurable and healing (balneotherapy) purposes. The spa, defined as; ‘a curative mineral spring, or a place associated with the same’, is where ‘water-health’ becomes most explicit (Pearsall, 2001). It has been suggested that the Walloon word espa (meaning fountain) became associated with the eponymous town in Belgium in the twelfth century (van Tubergen and van der Linden, 2002). The Romans referred to their healing springs as spa, suggested as an abbreviation of the phrase, sanitas per acqua or ‘health from water’ (Jackson, 1990). In employing Kearns and Gesler’s notion of therapeutic landscapes, the ways in which these differing forms of watering-place and their curative reputations are produced, sustained and contested lies at the heart of this work.

While healing watering-places have a global dimension, there are a number of contextual reasons for choosing Ireland as the setting for a book. Celtic cosmologies around nature and landscape were predicated on the spiritual and physical healing dimensions of place that reflected global indigenous cultural narratives. Trees and stones were part of that narrative but healing was also intricately connected with seas, lakes, rivers and springs (Rattue, 1995; Jones and Cloke, 2002). This focus on native and indigenous health may well resonate in other societies and settings. Secondly, Ireland’s complex historical position as both part of the UK, but also its closest and most volatile colony, provides a rich colonial and post-colonial setting within which to examine healing waters (Said, 1985). The social and cultural production of watering place forms, such as spatowns and sea-bathing resorts, offers rich potential for similar analyses in other colonial settings (Breathnach, 2004; Kavita, 2002; Urry, 2002). Thirdly, there are a number of examples in Ireland which act as markers for the more globalized production and reproduction of healthy places (Hoyez, 2007b). Examples include the Turkish bath phenomenon of the late nineteenth century along with modern spa and wellness settings that represent a form of globalizing therapeutic landscape (Williams, 2007; Shifrin, 2009). In addition, there are some relatively unique Irish phenomena such as the sweat-house and seaweed bath; country-specific expressions of healing waters which may also inspire comparable work within other jurisdictions. Finally, a deeply embedded and common expression in Irish vernacular culture, ‘The Cure’, referring to a power certain people and places have, attests to deep phenomenological and cultural connections with the therapeutic powers of nature, in which water remains prominent.

In setting out the book, this chapter briefly introduces the theoretical ideas that underpin a therapeutic landscapes approach. Five different place-studies then form individual chapters that investigate a range of such landscapes, all broadly categorized as ‘watering-places’. The specific settings include holy wells, spa towns, Turkish baths and sweat-houses, sea bathing resorts and the modern spa (see Figure 1.1). Each study investigates a specific water-based therapeutic landscape to study how that setting reflects a range of performances of health in historic and contemporary place. They also consider the natural/built, symbolic and individual/social environments within which such enactments and experiences take place (Gesler, 1992; Williams, 1999b). A final short summary chapter pulls together connections across the different watering-places and identifies some cross-cutting themes for future research.

Therapeutic Landscapes

Interactions with water take place within a cultural landscape which is the product of specific social, spatial, economic and political arrangements, cosmological and religious beliefs, knowledges and material culture, as well as ecological constraints and opportunities … Cultural landscapes contain deep historical roots. (Strang, 2004, 5)

In the early 1990s, and marking a shift from the earlier medical geography focus on epidemiology and health care planning, culture became more deeply embedded in explanations of health in place (Kearns and Gesler, 1998; Williams, 1999a; Kearns and Moon, 2002). In beginning to link cultural and health geographies through this period, the term landscape was heavily used with a particular focus on its cultural and phenomenological dimensions (Wylie, 2007). In both traditions, a notion of landscapes as symbolic, ‘as expressions of cultural values, social behaviour and individual actions worked upon particular localities over a span of time’ (Meinig, 1979), remained central. Such visions were attractive to health geographers who identified ways in which landscape, as a metaphor for place, could be reutilized as a central plank in new formations of the subject.

In these various guises the idea of ‘landscape’ has sought to convey many different meanings. For some, it is analogous to literally defined localities. For others it is a metaphor for the complex layerings of history, social structure and built environment that converge in particular places. Though its differing meanings suggest a degree of pluralism which sometimes borders on the chaotic, there is also a sense in which, notwithstanding its internal inconsistency, it remains the term that most clearly embodies the tropes of place and health that were expected to be the hallmarks of a new geography of health. (Kearns and Moon, 2002,611)

The attentions and interests of health geographers coalesced around a number of such landscapes (Gesler and Kearns, 2002). The term was applied to important investigations of health inequalities, drawn together under such banners as landscapes of exclusion, fear, risk and consumption (Curtis, 2004; Gatrell and Elliott, 2009). However, the emergent sub-theme most relevant to this work was the notion of the therapeutic landscape (Gesler, 1992; Williams, 1999c).

Initially developed by health geographer Wil Gesler and focused on ‘traditional’ settings, such as Epidauros and Bath, that work identified how symbolic and reputational narratives of health, as well as their material expression, were centrally involved in place creation and sustenance (Gesler, 1992; 1993; 1998; Williams, 1999a). The healing effects of place were also explored through natural and built environments as well as in more everyday therapeutic encounters experienced in place (Palka, 1999; Thurber and Malinowksi, 1999). Here the physical surroundings, whether majestic (in wilderness settings like Denali National Park) or domestic (in home, park, wood or garden), were connectively linked, in health terms, to earlier geographical explorations of ‘senses of place’ and perceived positive phenomenological connections between wellness and place (Tuan, 1974; Relph, 1976). In such natural and semi-natural settings, a mix of wood, stone, sky and water were linked to an affective response from humans, often expressed in spiritual terms as a manifestation of the sacred (Eliade, 1961; Graber, 1976) The therapeutic landscape concept was extended to a focus on design, allowing geographers to explore how specific built environments could be positively shaped for the improvement of health based on aspect, materials and affective elements of light, colour, space and, not-uncommonly, water (Kearns and Barnett, 1999; Curtis, 2004).

Much of the initial research on ‘traditional’ therapeutic landscapes focused on places associated with water (Smyth, 2005). Gesler’s studies of spa towns and pilgrimages sites such as Lourdes and Bath were particularly relevant (Gesler, 1996 and 1998). At Lourdes, the heavily commodified pilgrimage site in Southern France, the symbolic importance of water was central to narratives of reputational healing. In the stories of the curative power of its holy waters, place, setting and affect were combined, along with a sense of what Turner termed communitas, as expressions of communal faith healing (Taylor, 1995). At the same time Lourdes was identified as a highly commodified setting where the holy water became, alongside other icons and souvenirs, an essentially portable product (Gesler, 1996). These juxtapositions of health, belief and profit were common to many of the watering-places considered in this book. Water was also central to the historical reputation of Bath as a healing place (Gesler, 1998). From its original Pagan/Christian wells, to the Roman spa and its later Georgian manifestation, the hot springs at the site provided a physical and discursive connection to place and healing, evident in contemporary forms such as the Thermae Bath Spa (Gesler, 1998; Sharpe, 2006).

These connective uses of the health histories of place were also to be found in studies of spa towns in other settings, though relatively few were by health geographers. Geores’ work on Hot Springs in North Dakota identified the importance of metaphoric health narratives in the sustenance of place reputation from initial American Indian spiritual cure stories to its nineteenth-century commercial marketing and beyond (Geores, 1998). In the metaphor of ‘health=hot springs’, the selling of health through the invocation of the name reflected similar discursive uses of the word spa in the contemporary world. More broadly, while individual spas in different countries had their medical and social histories extensively reviewed, critical place-based health perspectives remained underdeveloped (Rockel, 1986; Brockliss, 1990; Hembry, 1990; Durie, 2003a). Valenza’s survey of Texan hot springs touched on the importance of embodied experiences of health in place, though this was a rare example of such an approach (Valenza, 2000). It was as if the early explorations of the spa town or pilgrimage site as exemplary therapeutic landscapes was taken as an imperative to develop the subject into any other site or setting, leaving those foundational sites surprisingly under-explored, despite the enormous global range of watering-places.

In considering ‘the continuing maturation’ of the therapeutic landscapes concept, two strands seem particularly relevant; the contestation of therapeutic assumptions and the formative role of experiential encounters in place (Hoey, 2007; Williams, 2007). A more critical approach to the assumed health benefits of encounters within therapeutic landscapes represented an important shift in thinking. In their work on the beach in New Zealand, Collins and Kearns identify the pharmaconial nature of these settings in health terms, through their potential ability to both cure (via connections with rest, leisure and exercise) and kill (from melanoma and drowning) (Collins and Kearns, 2007). Davidson and Parr’s work on phobic spaces extended the notion that one’s experience of place could also be negative/excluding and that the need for ‘safe havens’, echoing earlier mental health research by Pinfold, was an important part of person-place interaction (Pinfold, 2000; Davidson and Parr, 2007). Monolithic assumptions around socialization, place and health needed to be recast as individual imaginative negotiations where even being in certain places could be anti-therapeutic. In addition, therapeutic sites associated with water such as bathhouses, were re-assessed in terms of risky health behaviours, especially in relation to the risk of HIV/Aids infection at gay bathhouses; a setting specifically associated with the start of that global pandemic (Andrews and Holmes, 2007). Such liminal activities and health-risk associations have lengthy behavioural histories, expressed in a variety of social and sexual forms, at other watering-places such as public baths, springs, wells and the seaside (Shields, 1991; Corbin, 1994; Lenček and Bosker, 1998). These links to health behaviours emphasize the importance of individual inhabitation and performance in therapeutic outcomes, and these inherent contestations of health are revisited in the Irish setting (Davidson and Milligan, 2004).

As a closely-linked variant, such settings can also be seen as landscapes of therapeutic potential, shaped by personal and communal performances and wider structural forces. In challenging an assumption that places are inherently therapeutic, the importance of an individual’s own experience and response may create a positive or even negative effect. Using wider metaphors of retreat, escape and stillness, Conradson identifies the significance of the ‘therapeutic landscape experience’ as a relational outcome (Conradson, 2005b). In these nuanced interpretations,

particular landscapes are found to be not intrinsically healthy or unhealthy; rather they may be used, experienced and perceived differently by different people … In general terms, a therapeutic landscape experience might then be understood - from a human point of view - as a positive physiological and psychological outcome deriving from a person’s imbrications within a particular socio-natural material setting. (Conradson, 2005b, 339)

In that experiential encounter there are ties to Andrews, Sudwell and Sparks’ (2005) recent observations about the need to also consider the importance of imagined and affective therapeutic landscapes as much as material, physical ones.

While recent research on therapeutic landscapes has begun to focus on the experiential, and acknowledges the potential contradictory experiences that individuals and communities may have in place, these must be seen in the light of the wider contexts of the place. Additional recent work by health geographers has begun to revisit the connections between a sense of place and health, with a focus on both stable everyday as well as displaced settings (DeMiglio and Williams, 2008; Eyles and Williams, 2008). The continuing importance of culture, society and economy emphasizes how place remains active in shaping health and how health is, in turn, affected by, through and in place. While there are many ‘internal inconsistencies’ within the study of therapeutic landscape, it is precisely those contradictory narratives, identities and performances which continue to make them rich settings for geographical enquiry (Kearns and Barnett, 1999). In beginning to think around contemporary re-workings of the therapeutic landscape, an early definition of Gesler’s suggests twin components; ‘Inner/meaning (including the natural setting, the built environment, sense of place, symbolic landscapes, and everyday activities) and Outer/societal context (including beliefs and philosophies, social relations and/or inequalities, and territoriality)’ (Gesler, 1993, 173). In considering the twin roles of setting and context, therapeutic landscapes can, in part, be studied as material and empirical settings. Yet there is a deeper richness in examining those twin roles as enacted spaces of negotiations between inner and outer meanings.

Performances of Health

In considering how different watering-places are created and sustained, the notion of performance is central. The recent focus within therapeutic landscapes research around inhabitation and experience draws in part from wider cultural theory and what has been broadly termed, the ‘performative turn’ (Wylie, 2007). A backlash against overly representational approaches, the development of non-representational theory was linked to a deeper interest in how spaces were lived and inhabited, or the ‘texture of space and place rather than its textual representation’ (Hubbard, 2005; Thrift, 2008). Some of this research drew on a phenomenology where landscape was, ‘conceptualized in terms of active, embodied and dynamic relations between people and land, between culture and nature more generally’ (Wylie, 2007, 143). In addition, terms like ‘dwelling’ were used to emphasize these relationships in a performative sense through repeated encounters and persistent patterns of flow (Jones and Cloke, 2002). Some of these ‘dwellings’ were also considered to have a spiritual expression which connected to landscape qualities, well-being and health (Smith, 2005; Wylie, 2007). Within the performative turn, ‘feelings’ were also identified as a significant aspect of that deeper connection between inhabitation, action and place. The notion that self-landscape encounters and experiences could be expressed through moods, senses, feelings and emotions also related back to wider phenomenological and more-then-representational considerations (Lorimer, 2005; Tolia-Kelly, 2006). The emergence of emotional geographies and in particular the near-ubiquitous term, affect, within that research, further emphasized these theoretical connections between place and mood as an underused aspect of therapeutic landscapes (Anderson and Smith, 2001; Davidson and Milligan, 2004).

In considering performance more fully, ‘dwellings’ and ‘feelings’ were also expressed in ‘doings’, whereby individuals managed their own enactments and inhabitations in space (Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Thrift, 2004). These enactments had a particular relationship to space and place, in shaping where and how performances were produced, created, managed and understood. Less fully applied to the health/place arena than they might be, the potential of applying a set of ‘relational performance’ themes to an exploration of healing at the watering-place is both a challenge and an opportunity (Wylie, 2007). Within a wider field of health identities and beliefs, such actions could be formal, ritualized and normative but also resistive, transgressive, liminal and contested. In considering the creation of healthy spaces, the wider powers and structures involved in the creation of such places could be subtly altered to take a personal performative agency into account (Lorimer, 2005). In furthering a connection in terms of embodied practice; ‘non-representational geographies conceptualize the body as sensuous, sensitive, agentive and expressive in relation to the world, knowing and innovating amongst contexts and representations that become reconfigured in practice’. (Crouch, 2000, cited in Jones and Cloke, 2002, 8)

For health, this connection to how it is created in place via complex active and lived performances can also be seen in terms of what Nash, in her valuable comparison with artistic forms such as theatre and dance, describes as, ‘micro-geographies of habitual practices’ (Nash, 2000). While the rep...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Boxes
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Holy Wells: The Faith Cure
• 3 Spa Towns: The Rest Cure
• 4 Turkish Baths and Sweat-houses: The Sweating Cure
• 5 Sea Bathing: The Thalassic Cure
• 6 The Modern Spa: The Relaxation Cure
• 7 Conclusion
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index