Hydropathy was one of a number of 'alternative', or more properly 'heterodox', curative systems popularised in the early nineteenth century, alongside homoeopathy and mesmerism. It was the invention of a Silesian peasant, Vincent Priessnitz, an inhabitant of the small mountain settlement of Grafenberg, who in the 1820s enacted a self-cure for broken ribs by wrapping himself in bandages doused in cold mountain water. Priessnitz was clearly an ingenious, if uneducated, man. According to legend, he drew inspiration from watching a wounded deer treat itself in a spring. For a few years he developed his system empirically, first as a quasi-veterinarian treating his neighbours' sick animals, before graduating to the sick neighbours themselves.

His success at curing the peasants of Grafenberg was such that word of the cold water cure spread by mouth through the old Holy Roman Empire. A trickle of visitors soon turned to a flood and the Silesian peasant was, by the beginning of the 1840s, personally ministering to hundreds of valetudinarians a year. Of what did their treatment consist? Aside from the consumption of copious quantities of water (along with strict abstention from alcohol), the patient was subjected to a fearsome battery of baths and douches (all cold), a diet of plain food, and plentiful exercise in the wooded mountain surrounds, and bountiful rest. Whether Priessnitz knew it or not, he had managed to distil the old tenets of clean air, pure water and healthy location into a novel medical therapy.

Priessnitz became a celebrated figure and visitors came from near and far - from all Europe, Britain and even North America. Early visitors from Britain included medical men, most importantly failed society physician James Wilson and hardworking general practitioner Edward Johnson. Both felt that Priessnitz had stumbled upon a method of cure that reinvigorated the old Galenic tenets of hygienic medicine - the careful management of the patient's constitution through control of the non-naturals. On their return to England they set about re-interpreting the cold water cure within the framework of contemporary medical theory, publishing their observations and establishing their own hydropathic institutions where they aimed to cure the ills of the well-to-do.

Malvern, with its pure water supply, its temperate climate and romantic scenery, soon became a hot-bed of hydropathy, with Wilson, Johnson and James Manby Gully all establishing institutions there before 1850. The publicity given to hydropathy by Captain Claridge, who tirelessly travelled the length and breadth of the British Isles proselytising on behalf of the cold water cure, and the popular novelist Edward Bulwer Lytton whose account of his cure was widely read, drew wealthy members of the Victorian intelligentsia to Malvern and other centres of hydropathy. Among the celebrated patients were Charles Reade, Douglas Jerrold (who satirised Lytton's account and his own experiences in a piece for Punch, 'Life at the Cold Brandy and Water Cure'), Alfred Tennyson and Wilkie Collins. Even Charles Darwin put himself under the care of Gully and had baths constructed in the garden of Down House, where he could practise hydropathy with the aid of his gardener-cum-bathman.

Adapted from an article by James Bradley in the 'Treat Yourself' catalogue.

Related links

• Treat Yourself exhibition: Order the exhibition catalogue online to read the original 'Cold Cure' article