Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas (review)

There really is no place like home. But what makes it that way? Language, food, and familiars are part of the equation. For French colonials in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, it was climate that made the difference, according to Eric Jennings's Curing the Colonizers. Integrating the histories of metropolitan and colonial worlds, Jennings explores the ways in which French colonials attempted to purge themselves of the toxicity of the colonial atmosphere by engaging in elaborate forms of hydro- and climatic therapy. Whether undertaken in colonial space or through a return pilgrimage to a metropolitan spa such as Vichy, such cures aimed at healing specific diseases such as malaria, but more important, they served as a means of reinsertion into an appropriate climate for white Europeans.

Jennings makes good use of his skills as a comparativist. He draws on the histories of Guadeloupe, Madagascar, Tunisia, Réunion, and Vichy itself to highlight common trends in French imperial approaches to climate, constitution, and settlement, while also signaling patterns that made each of these sites unique. Along the way he provides useful discussions of French (and to a lesser extent other European) debates over the relationship between climate and race as well as a rich analysis of the history of hydrotherapy and other water treatments that exploited medical justifications.

By the end of the nineteenth century, as European settlers moved in droves to Algeria, France was also expanding its imperial holdings. The high mortality of settlers in the tropics had fed vigorous suspicion about the capacity of Europeans to acclimatize to new environments since at least the eighteenth century. Advocates of acclimatization locked in fierce debate with those who considered such moves to be deadly, or at the very least profoundly degenerative. The expansion of the French empire unfolded largely in tropical zones (North Africa excepted), with movement into West and Equatorial Africa, Madagascar, and Indochina among other sites, and coincided, Jennings argues, with the thorough eclipse of the acclimatization theory. Paradoxically, then, just as Europeans moved into the empire in ever-larger numbers, scientists argued for the impossibility of permanent settlement there.

The solution to this paradox was a raft of expert medical advice on hygienic measures that settlers could take in order to avoid physical and mental dissolution in the colonies. Chief among these, Jennings argues, was the use of a range of climatic and hydro-mineral cures aimed at protecting the fragile European body. The trend witnessed the emergence of new forms of colonial pilgrimage. Somewhat akin to the famed British use of the hill stations of India, French administrators, physicians, entrepreneurs, and tourists alternately constructed and appropriated sites in the colonies for the purposes of recuperation and prolongation of Europeans' capacity to remain in the tropics. Vichy in metropolitan France emerged as an important pilgrimage site for those with the means to travel whose vigor the "African climate has been sapping" (40).

Among the book's strongest elements is the sense of cohesion that emerges from the comparative method. Given the diversity of the sites that Jennings explores, it is remarkable that such similar practices and attitudes marked French approaches to making settlement possible. Yet the method also highlights differences among these patterns that point to a larger coherence. Although a retreat to high altitudes was often a component of climatic therapy, it was not essential, as the sea-level spa at Korbous in Tunisia makes clear. What was important was not necessarily the intersection of mineral springs and high altitude, but rather the possibility of "immersion in a microclimate or simply into [sic] a different climate from the ambient or dominant one" (155).

There are few disappointing elements in Jennings' engaging, thoroughly researched, and highly readable story. One is the absence of any true settler colonies in the analysis: Jennings argues that Algeria, France's largest settler colony, suffers a lack of sources on its many colonial spas. Nevertheless...