Health, Hedonism and Hypochondria: The Hidden History of Spas

Contents

Introduction – der kurschatten

1 Classical Origins

2 The Middle Ages – From Holy Wells to Stew houses

3 The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries – the Birth of the Modern Medical Spa

4 The Eighteenth Century – the Emergence of Bath as the Model Spa

5 The Nineteenth Century – Baden-Baden becomes the Boulevard of Europe

6 Hydrotherapy – a short sharp douche of cold water

7 La Belle Époque – the Flourishing of Karlsbad and Marienbad

8 The last hundred years

Conclusion – Europe’s traditional spas today

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Index

Plates

Introduction – der kurschatten

A spa nowadays can be anything from a hot tub in the back garden to an exotic beach resort offering mindfulness and ayurvedic yoga. The word is regularly used by nail bars, hairdressers and other outposts of the booming beauty and wellness industry that seem ever to expand as most other high street businesses are contracting. According to figures produced by the Global Wellness Institute in 2018, new spas are opening around the world at a rate of 8,000 a year and there are now over 150,000 ‘spa locations’ employing 2.6 million people and contributing $120 billion annually to the $4.2 trillion global wellness economy. Thermal and mineral springs, counted as a separate category, employ a further 1.8 million and generate $56.2 million annually.

The 2010 Global Spa Summit defined spas as ‘establishments that promote wellness through the provision of therapeutic and other professional services aimed at renewing the body, mind and spirit’. Historically, the term has much more specific connotations. First adopted in the early fourteenth century by the resort based around natural mineral springs in the wooded hills of the Ardennes, near Liège in what is now Belgium, which still bears the name Spa, there are conflicting theories as to its etymology. Some maintain that it derived from the Walloon word espa, meaning fountain, others that it was an acronym of the Latin phrase sanitas per aquam, attributed to the emperor Nero. It is more likely to come from the Latin verb spargere, meaning to sprinkle or moisten, and specifically from sparsa fontana (a gushing fountain). The word was brought into wider currency by two English doctors who visited the original Spa in the early seventeenth century and came to be applied, initially in the English-speaking world but later more generally, to all those places possessing natural springs, rich in minerals and often coming out of the ground hot or warm, to which people resorted to drink or bathe for therapeutic purposes.

These specific connotations are clear in the various names that have been applied to spa resorts across Continental Europe – villes d’eaux or stations thermales in French, Heilbäder or Kurorte in German, terme in Italian, balnearios in Spanish, lázně in Czech, gyógyfürdők in Hungarian, banjas in Serbo-Croat and zdroje in Polish. In North America the preferred term has been ‘springs’. These words emphasise the presence of thermal water and the practice of bathing. Continental Europeans have tended to think in terms of ‘taking a cure’, as indicated by the French and German terms for spa-goers, curistes and Kurgäste, rather than use the English phrase ‘taking the waters’. But all are agreed on the importance of the waters to spas and their properties have been the subject of much analysis and precise definition. Thermal mineral water is recognised as such when its temperature at source exceeds 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit) and/or its mineral content is at least one gram of dissolved salts or solids per litre or kilogram of water.

This book is about the historic, traditional spas of Europe. They include such well-known resorts as the original Spa in Belgium; Bath, Buxton and Harrogate in Britain; Baden-Baden, Bad Ems and Wiesbaden in Germany; Vichy and Aix-les-Bains in France; Baden bei Zürich and Bad Ragaz in Switzerland; Bad Ischl and Baden bei Wien in Austria; and Marienbad and Karlsbad in the Czech Republic. Those located in Continental Europe are still for the most part thriving as spas, unlike those in Britain, where sea bathing took over from inland spa cures and the coming of the National Health Service sounded the death knell for spa medicine. Occasional mention will also be made of those transatlantic offspring of the European spas, the White Sulphur Springs of Western Virginia and Saratoga Springs in Upstate New York.

These spas were the pioneers of the vast modern wellness industry and are now part of it, providing natural therapies and remedies as an alternative to conventional drug-based, high-tech medicine. They continue to offer, as they always have, escape, distraction and diversion, especially for the well-off and the stressed, and to pander to the eternal search for the body beautiful and the desire to cheat age and decay. They stand in a long tradition. The therapeutic benefits and pleasures of bathing in thermal mineral waters were first seriously appreciated by the ancient Greeks and Romans, who developed a rich social culture based around communal baths. After a somewhat fallow period in the Middle Ages, spas came into their own again in the sixteenth century thanks to serious scientific analysis of their waters by members of the new medical profession. They began to attract royal and aristocratic patronage and to develop cures for a huge variety of ailments and conditions based on taking their waters both internally and externally. Many in the upper and increasingly also in the middle classes took themselves off to a spa for ‘the season’ – usually the summer months – to escape the overpowering heat, stench, noise and general unpleasantness of city life and recharge their batteries. They were in many ways the earliest vacationers or holiday-makers. Spas established themselves as the first holiday resorts, adding luxury hotels, assembly rooms, theatres, concert halls, casinos and other places of entertainment to their core health facilities of bath houses and pump rooms or drinking halls.

In their heyday, from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, Europe’s spas were the main meeting places for royalty, aristocracy and political, business and cultural elites; centres of political and diplomatic intrigue; and fertile sources of artistic, literary and musical inspiration and creativity. They became known as the cafés of Europe, a phrase first applied to Spa and Baden bei Wien. They epitomised style, luxury and ostentation and were renowned for their cosmopolitan atmosphere and glittering whirl of balls, gambling and flirtatious assignations as much as for their healing waters.

The history of spas can be approached from several different angles – medically and scientifically, by analysing their waters, their claims and their cures; architecturally, by looking at their distinctive buildings based around a landscaped Kurpark; politically, by charting their significant role in major events in European history; culturally, by exploring their influence on literature, music and art; spiritually, by probing their origins in religious cults based around water and medieval holy wells and their appeal as places of pilgrimage; sociologically and anthropologically, by analysing their distinctive clienteles, the motives that took people there and the distinctive spa ‘types’; and from a business and economic perspective, by examining their development as the first true holiday destinations and pioneers of the tourism and travel industry. There is a rich range of literary sources on which to draw in the numerous travel diaries, novels, poems and letters written in and about them.

This book uses several of these different approaches and many of these sources to look below the surface and probe the more hidden aspects of the history of spas and what might be described as their secret or shadow side. It follows on from my earlier studies of the relationship between spas and music-making (Bradley 2010) and the place of spas in the wider spiritual history of water (Bradley 2012).

Spas are often hidden places in a very literal sense, sited in remote locations away from major centres of population. It is part of their appeal as resorts to which people have escaped from the pressures of everyday life and the pollution of cities. Britain’s most northerly, westerly and easterly spas certainly conform to this pattern. Strathpeffer in the Scottish Highlands, Llandrindod Wells in mid-Wales and Woodhall Spa at the edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds stand in the middle of sparsely populated countryside, their huge hotels, grand villas and ornate public buildings seeming incongruous in their isolated rural settings. Many Continental European spas are similarly tucked away. They are often literally at the end of the line when it come to access by rail, nowhere more so than the original Spa, which is reached by an ancient two-carriage train from Aachen that trundles through a wooded valley and makes its final halt at the terminus of Spa-Géronstère, named after one of the main sources and consisting of a single platform, a small shelter and a set of buffers.

The sources that provide spas with their raison d’être are also often hidden and secret. Water emerges mysteriously from the ground, having lain hidden for hundreds of thousands of years, forced up under pressure because of geological faults and rock fissures, sometimes in a trickle or a steady flow but often seething and steaming, gushing out in strong, pulsing ejaculations. Penetrating to these sources can be a profoundly mystical experience. I have felt this descending to the original spring at Baden bei Wien, discovered by the Romans and called the Römerquelle. It is reached by going through a door in a faceless modern municipal building behind the elegant Edwardian Summer Arena where operettas are performed. A steep flight of steps descends deep into the earth to arrive in a marble-tiled hall with a glass-covered dome under which the spring continually bubbles up as if from an enchanted cauldron. In many spas, it is difficult to find the source of the waters. They seep out of hidden fissures and swamps, concealed behind dense foliage or by a network of half-buried pipes and tanks which capture the precious water and channel it to bath houses and pump rooms.

The hiddenness of the sources of thermal waters has given rise to contrasting reflections. For some, it prompts thoughts of God, as in the inscription in the stained-glass window installed in 1888 in the hallway of the Royal Baths in Bath:

The spring from whence these waters flow

In the deep rock lies hid below,

So let thy bounty hidden be

And only God the giving see.

By contrast, early descriptions of spas often speak of their waters coming from ‘the very bowels of the earth’ and compare them to the infernal regions of the Underworld. There is often something rather Hell-like about their location and atmosphere. This was certainly the case with the original baths at Pfäfers near the modern Swiss spa of Bad Ragaz, which were located at the bottom of the precipitous Tamina Gorge. The thermal spring here, which emerges through rocks from an underground lake at a constant temperature of 36.5 degrees Celsius (98 degrees Fahrenheit) and a rate of seven million litres a day, making it Europe’s most abundant thermal mineral water source, was supposedly first discovered around 1240 by birdcatchers hunting for ibis. Traversing the steep-sided cliffs where the birds nested, they noticed steam emerging from their base. Discounting the fear that they might encounter dragons in the murky depths below, they made the perilous descent to the bottom of the gorge where they found pools of hot water, which subsequent visitors found to be efficacious for relieving muscular pain and curing rheumatism and other conditions. For the first 300 years of their existence, the natural baths at Pfäfers could only be accessed via ropes with bathers being lowered several hundred feet down the sheer cliff face in baskets or slings (Plate 1). Even after a wooden staircase was built up the side of the gorge in 1543, the descent remained perilous and there were numerous accidents. Those brave enough to take a cure there are said to have remained for up to twelve days in the primitive baths hewn out of rock where, in the words of an observer in 1550, ‘they sat in the dark like souls in St Patrick’s Purgatory’. A visitor in 1630 described ‘a horrible site of deepest solitude, similar to the Acheron or the Stygian swamps’ (Croutier 1992: 144–5). Even today, when the source is accessed via a hair-raising four-kilometre bus journey down a twisting single-track road with a precipitous drop, followed by a 450-metre walk along a narrow pathway clinging to the side of the cliff wall with the Tamina river raging below, it remains a terrifying place with just a tiny chink of daylight far above relieving the gloom of the dark, dank, oppressive primeval atmosphere.

Other thermal water sources have been similarly compared to Hell over the years. In Richard Graves’ 1773 comic romance, The Spiritual Quixote, a Bath landlord frightens one of his guests on his return from the baths by telling him that their heat ‘was caused by a constant fire in the bowels of the earth, which had been burning ever since Noah’s flood and would in time burn up the whole world’ (Graves 1792: 350). An anonymous rhyme about Harrogate’s highly sulphurous springs suggests demonic origins:

As Satan was flying over Harrogate’s wells

His senses were charmed by the heat and the smells!

Said he, ‘I don’t know in what region I roam,

But I guess from the smell that I’m not far from home!’

Rather different evocations of Hell and the Underworld are conjured up in one of the key features of the cure at the Austrian spa of Bad Gastein where patients are taken on special trains deep into the nearby Böckstein mountain to lie for hours inhaling radon gas in tunnels originally dug by gold miners. The ancient mines were reopened during the Second World War by Hermann Goering to raise funds for the Nazi war effort and prisoners sent down to dig for gold reported their aches, pains and war wounds being mysteriously cured by the effects of the radioactive gas. The combination of the radioactivity, sweltering heat and humidity in the tunnels, known as the Heilstollen, is not to everyone’s taste and there are a good many warnings about the feeling of suffocation and claustrophobia that may be experienced by those being taken into the bowels of the mountain to undergo this hidden and somewhat hellish cure.

Like the invisible radon gas used in the cure at Bad Gastein and at several other European spas, the chemical and mineral elements that play such an important role in the supposed therapeutic benefits of thermal waters are often hidden. Sometimes they are revealed by sight or smell – the reddish colour of the waters at Tunbridge Wells indicates that they are chalybeate, or iron-rich, while the strong whiff of rotten eggs that hangs around Harrogate points to the high sulphur content of the waters there. Unlike iron and sulphur, the third most common component found in thermal waters, sodium chlorine, which provides the saline sources found in many spas, is largely colourless and odourless, as are other minerals such as barium, magnesium and calcium. Only detailed chemical analysis reveals what is in the water.

Many of the therapeutic benefits associated with spa cures are also largely hidden. The water does its stuff out of sight, if not out of mind. This is especially the case with drinking-based cures where the emphasis is on cleansing, purging and washing out the system and effectively tackling digestive problems, constipation, diseased liver and urinary complaints. The after-effects of taking the waters cannot always be hidden, however. The strongly diuretic and laxative properties of the highly saline waters at Llandrindod Wells were reflected in the row of seventy-six toilets erected near the pump room. The therapeutic benefits of bathing in thermal waters are similarly hidden, being effected through the supposed penetration of mineral traces into the skin so that they reach the bloodstream and perform their healing work on vital organs, tissue and muscles. It is especially the unseen parts of the body which spas claim to treat – notably the intestines, sexual organs and nether regions. A patient taking a cure in Baden-Baden in the mid-nineteenth century described the doctor coming into his bedroom at five thirty in the morning and briskly announcing, ‘Monsieur, nous allons visiter les entrails [sic]’ before proceeding ‘to palp and palp the abdomen, looking grave and concentrated’ and eventually exclaiming: ‘Les entrails sont libres’ (Granville 2012: 81).

There are other hidden aspects of spa treatments. They are often carried out in private. Drinking the waters has always been, and remains, a largely communal activity, albeit one often undertaken in a rather hushed atmosphere of silent determination with little social interaction. Throughout the Middle Ages bathing was also communal and, following the example of the Romans, it was often the occasion for considerable conviviality and not a little sexual excitement. From the later eighteenth century onwards there was a growing tendency to take baths in private and the numerous spa treatments, including douches, massages, inhalations and increasingly complex therapies involving electrical and magnetic currents that proliferated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were administered behind closed doors. Anyone visiting a spa for medical purposes today enters a secret world of long featureless corridors, off which are treatment rooms and cubicles hidden from public view. They generally have separate entrances from the more open and inviting recreational and ‘wellness’ areas of spa buildings. This is very clearly the case in the Gellért Baths in Budapest where those undergoing medical treatments are directed up a discreet and rather dingy set of side stairs by a sign saying ‘Inhalatorium, Complex Physiotherapy and Curative Gymnastics’. They lead to a network of coldly clinical white-walled passages, reminiscent of hospital out-patient areas, filled with people sitting on plastic chairs, clutching their treatment plans and waiting for a therapist to usher them into his or her private demesne. The atmosphere could not be more different from the open, brightly coloured art deco halls of the main bath complex which is all that the many tourists and leisure bathers see.

There can also be a rather hidden aspect to the Kurparks which form the serious ‘thermal zone’ in several spas. It is not just that they tend to be sited off the main thoroughfares and away from the bustle of shopping streets and places of entertainment. They are often slightly gloomy spaces full of dark overhanging trees. In Bad Schwalbach in the Hesse region of Germany large signs at the entrance to the Kurpark bear the command ‘Ruhe!’ (Quiet!). Looming over the north side are the high walls of one of the many clinics, which specialise in psychosomatic medicine as well as rehabilitation and the treatment of degenerative conditions. When I walked through the park, I was conscious of pale, sad, shadowy faces peering down from tiny windows on the top floor of what looked all too like a prison. In Bad Ems, those undertaking prescribed medical cures are even more tucked away out of sight, being herded together in three huge and very ugly clinics surrounded by trees in the forbidding Kurwald, which is sited on the top of the cliffs above the town. It constitutes a hidden, self-contained abode of the sick far removed from the jolly world of weekend wellness packages in the hotels below (see here).

There is a more pervasive hidden side to spas which is a major theme of this book. It is well expressed in the German word der Kurschatten, literally the cure shadow, to which I was introduced by a German academic as we walked through the deserted streets of Bad Wildbad, a rather haunted spa town itself hidden away in the middle of the Black Forest. She told me that it signifies ‘the shadow who is following you throughout your stay and disappears when you go home’. The word is generally used to describe the romantic and amorous dalliances that regularly took place in spas during their golden age, and perhaps much more occasionally still do today. Dictionary definitions range from the somewhat coy ‘lady/gentleman friend met during a stay at a spa’, through ‘person at a health spa with whom one develops a relationship’ and ‘admirer at a health resort’ to the rather more bold ‘companion of the opposite sex picked up while on a cure’. The German Wikipedia entry on der Kurschatten states that ‘it implies eroticism but the resulting relationship can also remain platonic’. Indeed, it can refer to a spa romance that never gets beyond the stage of imagination and fantasy. The phrase is expressed visually in a series of saucy German postcards showing older men chasing younger women and in the Kurschattenbrunnen sculptured in 1987 in the central square of the spa town of Bad Wildungen in North Hesse, Germany. A group of naked bathers are clustered close together in the centre of the fountain. In one of the pools around its base, an elderly naked man sits looking out towards a female figure walking past in a figure-hugging dress. Depending on the position of the sun, she casts a shadow over her admirer (Plate 11).

There were many reasons why those staying in spas seem to have been particularly susceptible to amorous dalliances and sexual encounters. The principle of romances on ocean liners, that ‘what happens on board stays on board’, pertained among those taking a cure, who were often without an accompanying spouse, spending anything from two or three weeks to several months away from home, and unlikely to meet their fellow curistes again. These circumstances were conducive to the formation of relationships and encouraged a belief that casual flings could be indulged in with no lasting consequences – although, as we shall see, several men and women came away from taking the waters with rather more than they had bargained for in the form of sexually transmitted diseases or pregnancies. Then there was the fact that bathing was often naked and mixed – one thing not hidden in spas was the human body. From Roman times until the present day, bath houses have been notorious as places for pick-ups and casual sexual encounters and in the Middle Ages many effectively functioned as brothels and became known as ‘stew houses’.

Both male impotence and female sterility were prominent on the list of conditions which it was claimed were most successfully treated by a course of taking the waters internally and externally. Those suffering from the former complaint may perhaps sometimes have been stimulated into potency by the sight of the jets of thermal water that shot from the ground with huge force at several spas and which are difficult to describe without using language suggestive of male ejaculation. There is an unmistakable sexual as well as mystical note in this account by an English visitor to Karlsbad in the mid-nineteenth century of the Sprudel fountain which still excites visitors today:

The violent, lofty, constant and prodigal up-pourings of hot water out of the bowels of the earth, foaming in the midst of its clouds of vapour, rivetted me to the spot for some moments … What is it that imparts to this mysterious current that violent impulse which makes it spring from the bosom of the earth, with an upright jet, of eight or nine feet elevation and which propels it, with convulsive and vehement throbs? … In times of darkness and superstition, man would have fallen prostrate before, and adored, this unquiet and relentless agent which fills the atmosphere with hot vapours and impetuously overruns all the bounds by which art has vainly attempted to restrain its endless throes. (Granville 2012: 102)

I have to say that the imagery of male ejaculation came to my mind when I first saw the Coesa Spouter in Saratoga Springs State Park. The water spurts intermittently from a piece of rubber tubing that rides up and down in the middle of a lake looking from a distance like a mini-Loch Ness Monster. An American lady viewing the same spouter in the mid-nineteenth century was left with a rather different impression. It inspired her to pen this improving ditty, which more than makes up in high-minded moral sentiment for what it lacks in poetic sophistication:

Oh water that doth mount on slender tip,

And spoutest up some thirty feet, through pole;

Oh Hope, learn thou a lesson from the water’s lip,

Spout out, spout out, in peace from hollow soul.

This chaste female take on the thrusting vigour of spa waters contrasts with the way that they were often marketed to women desperate to conceive. As well as bathing in them, they were encouraged to play around a bit with the local men in case it was their husbands who were the problem. A ballad published in 1678 described the pleasures awaiting those who came to Tunbridge Wells:

Then you that hither childless come,

Leave your dull marriage behind you.

You’ll never wish yourselves at home:

Our youth will be so kind to you.

The resident physician in Bad Ems in the mid-nineteenth century, Dr Celius, was well known for telling beautiful upper-class ladies that their illnesses would only be cured if they separated from their husbands. Among those who took his advice was Susan, Countess of Lincoln, who sparked off a major society scandal in 1848 by embarking on a disastrous affair there with Lord Walpole. There were plenty of other spa doctors who could be relied on to offer similar advice to those who felt themselves trapped in boring marriages.

The amatory possibilities inherent in spa cures have been a constant theme of writers. In 1592, the English traveller Fynes Moryson noted of those visiting Baden bei Zürich in Switzerland that ‘many having no disease but that of love come hither for remedy, and many times find it’ (Strachan 1962: 74). A treatise about the same spa published in 1739, which recounted the tale of an aristocrat who came with a broken leg and left with a nun whom he abducted, described the baths as ‘a theatre of illicit pleasures’ (Grenier 1985: 147). John Saxe’s poem ‘Pray, What Do They Do at the Springs’ gave a candid sense of what went on in Saratoga Springs in the 1840s:

Now they stroll in the beautiful walks,

Or loll in the shade of the trees;

Where many a whisper is heard

That never is told by the breeze;

And hands are commingled with hands,

Regardless of conjugal rings;

And they flirt, and they flirt, and they flirt,

And that’s what they do at the Springs!

Flirting in both North American and European spas often began as early as five or six in the morning when people gathered at the springs. Simply seeing women drink excited some men, like the one who was moved to verse as he watched a ‘surpassingly beautiful lady’ at the White Sulphur Springs in Virginia:

She drinks – she drinks; behold the matchless dame;

To her ’tis water – but to us ’tis flame

Another would-be poet employed more suggestive language as he envied ‘the liquid she sips/Between her pulpy, swelling, ruby lips’ (Chambers 2002: 137).

Several of those writing about spas suggested that they suited clandestine affairs and passionate couplings not just because of the sensuousness and steaminess of the waters but also because of the many beautiful walks and shady, secluded corners in their Kurparks which seemed almost to have been designed for illicit romance. In his description of Bad Homburg in the opening pages of his tale of spa seduction, ‘Eugene Pickering’, Henry James highlighted the Kurpark’s ‘dusky woods’ and the fact that even on a hot day ‘you may walk about for a whole afternoon in unbroken shade’ (James 1999: 36, 40). Ford Madox Ford, who himself knew a thing or two about spa romances, wrote in similar terms of Bad Nauheim’s ‘discreet shelters’ (Ford 2008: 10).

Spas were favourite places for affairs and seductions both in real life and in fiction. They usually but not invariably involved older men and young women. The twenty-two-year-old courtesan, Marie Duplessis, later to be the model for Marguerite Gautier in Alexandre Dumas’ La Dame aux camélias and Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata, became the mistress of a wealthy seventy-year-old count while staying in Baden-Baden in the hope of curing her tuberculosis. Johann von Goethe regularly visited the spas of Bohemia to cure his gout, stomach problems and insatiable libido, pursuing numerous young women in Karlsbad and Marienbad including one who was his junior by more than fifty years (see here and here). He dismissed his spa romances as mere Äugelchen (oglings) but the objects of his leering took a rather different view – one complained that ‘he viewed the world as one big peep-show’.

German spas in particular became popular settings for seductions in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels. Among those who fell victim in Baden-Baden were the young bride seduced at the baths by an unscrupulous Italian marquis in Leo Tolstoy’s Family Happiness, the innocent maiden beguiled into unhappy wedlock by a feckless lord in George Meredith’s The Amazing Marriage, and the destitute lady’s maid whisked off by the son of a prosperous American manufacturer in Theodore Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt. Not all these fictional seductions involved older men having their wicked way with young women. The hero of Ivan Turgenev’s Smoke, also set in Baden-Baden, was a naïve and recently engaged young farmer fatally attracted to and seduced by the older woman with whom he had been in love ten years earlier. Two novels set in Bad Homburg had a similar theme: Edmund Yates’s Black Sheep chronicled the seduction of the married hero, Stewart Routh, by Mrs Ireton Bembridge, a predatory but beguiling New York socialite, while in Henry James’s ‘Eugene Pickering’ the eponymous hero broke off his engagement and had a month-long affair with the widowed Madame Blumenthal who seduced him at the gaming table (see here). In Turgenev’s novella Spring Torrents the naïve Sanin was seduced, and his engagement to his beloved scuppered, by the ‘man-eating’ Madame Polozova in Wiesbaden.

Several authors put their own experiences of Kurschatten into their novels. Ford Madox Ford based The Good Soldier on the adulterous affair on which he had embarked with fellow writer Violet Hunt in 1910. It began in Bad Nauheim and continued in Bad Homburg and Bad Schwalbach. The book is set in Bad Nauheim and painfully describes the adulterous relationship that develops between Florence Dowell and Edward Ashburnham, ‘just exactly the sort of chap that you could have trusted your wife alone with’ yet who shows himself ‘a raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbour’s womenkind’ during the annual cures that they take with their respective spouses (Ford 2008: 16). Stefan Zweig’s short story ‘The Burning Secret’ (originally ‘Brennendes Geheimnis’), which was turned into a silent film in 1923 and filmed again in 1933 and 1988, tells of a beautiful woman bringing her asthmatic adolescent son to the Austrian spa of Semmering for a cure. There they meet a suave, mysterious Austrian