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  • Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas
  • George Weisz
Eric T. Jennings . Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006. xi + 271 pp. Ill. $74.95 (cloth, ISBN-10: 0-8223-3808-4, ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-3808-6), $21.95 (paperbound, ISBN 10: 0-8223-3822-X, ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-3822-2).

There is now a huge literature on colonial medicine and health. There is in contrast a relatively tiny literature on spas and mineral waters. Eric Jennings has combined the two themes by writing a pioneering book on spa therapy in the French colonial empire.

The rationale of spa therapy among French colonists is familiar to all historians of colonial medicine because it was based on a commonplace of tropical medicine: the climate of colonies in the tropics was considered highly toxic to Europeans who could never fully adapt to such a "foreign" environment. Although much has been written on the subject, Jennings does a good job in his first chapter of summarizing the literature on the health anxieties of colonizers and the associated medical theories that reflected and nourished them, particularly the debate about whether acclimatization (and thus colonization) was possible. There were fundamentally two ways to deal with this highly charged anxiety about the unhealthiness of the tropics: periodic returns to the more salubrious homeland, possible only for some, and development of islands of healthfulness in the colonies—British colonial hill stations, for instance—where constitutions could be cleansed or detoxified in a locale that was relatively accessible.

The French version of these medical theories added one key element to the mix. Because mineral water therapeutics was so much more developed in France than in Britain, spa therapy was added to simple change of climate. The top-of-the-line therapy was a visit to a spa in the French homeland. Vichy, Jennings argues, was the spa of choice for colonists in part because of its reputation for relieving liver ailments, believed to be particularly common in the tropics. But it was by no means the only alternative. Some civil servants in fact had the right to paid cures of this sort every few years. For those unable to make the trip home or who could not do so frequently enough, local spas were developed to cure the colonials on a more regular basis. These were meant to be small versions of French spas. Jennings repeatedly makes the point, plausible but not as fully documented as one would like, that spas had a cultural function as well: they provided re-immersion in a French milieu as "a way of maintaining Frenchness, of assuaging the effects of acclimatization in a tropical setting, and of forestalling degeneration and creolization" (p. 35).

Following the introductory chapter, Jennings discusses the medical thinking that justified the movement of colonials to French and local spas, thinking accepted apparently by colonial officials who developed complex rules regulating spa travel and treatment. He then goes on to discuss a number of colonial spas in individual chapters. The documentation seems a bit thin, but some of the accounts are nonetheless compelling. The chapter on Guadeloupe with its ten different spas, despite a reputation for being far less unhealthy than other French [End Page 459] colonies, is particularly rich. But in the end, no local spas could really compete against the metropole.

Jennings's final chapter describes the importance of Vichy for colonials. Citing some literature of the period, Jennings sees Vichy as a kind of "informal imperial hub" (p. 185) where people came to prepare for and recover from stays in a colony; for some, Vichy served as a place of retirement. Plausibly, but again without much evidence, Jennings suggests that sociability at Vichy was central to the development of informal networks of individuals that cut across individual colonies.

If Jennings's individual arguments are not always convincing, and if the claim that spas—whether in the colonies or France—were meant to preserve Frenchness as much as health is not demonstrated, there is no denying the overall quality of this book. Jennings has used great historical ingenuity to collect...

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