When Doctors Prescribed The Beach As Medicine

Up until the Georgian era (about 1714 to 1837) nobody much cared about the English coast except for the fishermen who lived there. The only people who stayed in seaside accommodation were those who made their living on the sea. But by the turn of the 19th century, the restricted travel occasioned by the Napoleonic Wars and the rise of the health industry turned the English seaside resort into a fashionable pursuit.

Georgian medicine was still based on the ancient Greek belief in the four humors, basically attributing illness to a combination of too much or too little blood, phlegm, and yellow and black bile, and the ‘cures’ involved bloodletting and purging. So yes, a day at the beach really does sound better.

As author Caroline Rance puts it, the medical profession in Georgian England was “close to a free-for-all”. Sure, there was the Company of Surgeons (which separated from the Barbers’ Company in 1745), but beyond that, anyone could open their doors and start curing people. Yes, a literal free-for-all!

In 1750, the physician Dr. Richard Russell published his Dissertation Concerning the Use of Sea Water in Diseases of the Glands, among them scurvy, jaundice and leprosy. This went through six editions, was said to be able to cure tumors and was by far the most influential book in England’s whole seaside health craze.

In Russell’s view, it was the salt in the sea water that made it superior to the waters of inland spas such as Bath. His argument relied on references to the ‘ancients’, the classical authorities most respected by doctors of the Georgian period, which supported his view that sea water was a purgative with a long history of use. This assertion itself, as much as anything, helped in the marketing of the cure.

Naturally, Russell’s book was packed with anecdotes to back up his thesis, including the tale of a farmer’s wife suffering from colic who passed 300 stones after being treated with sea water. Two years later, she delivered a healthy child! Russell did not actually attribute the birth to the cure, but the inference was obvious.

By 1753, Russell was building a house on the beach itself so that he could personally supervise his patients’ bathing. Seriously, how dedicated is that? He attracted rich clients too. Historian Robert Ritchie believes Russell actually created the resort of Brighton out of the fishing village of Brighthelmstone.

Doctors also told patients to drink sea water. Salty, right? Well, it was usually mixed with milk and honey to make the taste bearable. Russell recommended drinking sea water regularly, claiming it would open the body and revive the appetite. Dr. John Awsiter even claimed that it could cure infertility!

Though Brighton may get the credit today, Scarborough in Yorkshire is believed to have been the first English town to be redeveloped as a seaside resort. Scarborough began as a mineral spa town in the 1620s and adopted sea bathing in the 1730s, years before Brighton and Weymouth were seen as fashionable places for the rich.

In a more restrained age, however, sea bathing was highly organized. The bathing machine, a little wheeled shed that was pulled out into the surf, allowed people to undress and wade into the sea without being observed from the beach. Women, to protect their modesty, often bathed fully clothed inside the machine; men more frequently bathed naked if they were safely out at sea.

Sometimes swimmers required assistance in getting into the sea. Which, it must be said, could be chilly! There were attendants known as “dippers,” who helped or forced women into the sea. Male attendants, known as “bathers,” performed the same duty for men.

Benjamin Beale, a Quaker, invented a cloth awning that would attach to bathing machines for modest women who wanted to shield themselves from prying eyes on the clifftops above. The awnings didn’t always work; onlookers on the clifftops above reportedly still found ways to watch.

The women who bathed at the beach usually went in wearing a flannel dress, and some even had weights sewn into the hem of their dresses to keep the material from floating up.

Georgian doctors preferred bathing at the height of winter, believing the cold of the ocean produced a stronger tonic effect on the body. This is why the novelist Jane Austen’s cousin Eliza took her son to Margate in the winter of 1791 (January and February): ‘I continued the bathing, though we had frost & snow, which I thought did him good’.

Even Jane Austen tried the cure herself, writing about a dipping session in Lyme Regis in 1804. Her dipper, a woman named Molly, was so keen on the practice that, according to the author, Austen was kept in the water rather longer than she intended.

According to the writer Fanny Burney, when King George III came to Weymouth in 1789 for sea bathing as a cure for his physical and mental health, the moment he was dipped for the first time, fiddlers within a bathing machine played the national anthem. He made fourteen further visits to Weymouth after that first one.

The future George IV was Prince of Wales wwhen he came to Brighton and gave it a very different kind of reputation. He built his Royal Pavilion there to indulge in gambling and women, not for health treatments.

During the 1800s, people thought disease was spread by “miasmas” representing bad smells. Women’s publications like Godey’s Lady’s Book warned that constant exposure to such miasmas made one perpetually nervous. It’s no wonder that people valued the fresher ocean air.

By the Victorian era, doctors sent convalescing patients to the seaside for more “ozone,” the name they gave to the healing properties of salt air. In one 1886 magazine piece, a physician informs a concerned parent that her child no longer requires a medicine bottle but just a trip where the child can breathe as much ozone as they like.

While doctors no longer recommend chugging sea water, scientists have discovered genuine advantages to living near the ocean. The University of Freiburg in Germany published a paper in 1999 finding that salt water baths combined with UV light treatment helped reduce symptoms of skin diseases including dermatitis and psoriasis, and a 2019 study of more than 26,000 participants concluded that those living within a kilometer of the coast had significantly better mental health.

This content was created with the help of AI.