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and the emergence of the notion of ‘obstetric violence’. Using a transnational feminist approach, I argue that a tendency towards geopolitical bifurcation (rooted in racist and colonial historical legacies) frames the ways in which birth violence has been approached and conceptualised in different settings. As a result of this bifurcation, separate literatures and vocabularies have developed, which frame the issue of birth violence in distinctive ways depending on geopolitical zones. The conceptual usefulness of the term ‘obstetric violence’ is thus considered as an
Since the 1980s two simultaneous processes took place that reflect the emergence of violence as a public health problem in Latin America. First, these decades witnessed an increase in the volume of scientific literature related to violence, as well as in a wide range of publications by national and international organisations (such as the World Health Organization, the Pan American
, and for good reason, since Roman Catholics were known to entertain a specific relationship with thaumaturgic waters. Holy wells and miracle springs had been forbidden or destroyed during the Reformation, yet some survived or re-emerged in the form of spas, from Restoration to Regency. Dealing with this murky past could create political controversies, as was the case for St Winifred's Well in Wales. And yet, medical writings and travel literature reveal subtler forms of negotiations and re-appropriations within the Protestant medical cultures of the eighteenth
In the medical world of eighteenth-century Britain, doctors, caregivers and relief-seeking patients considered mineral waters a valuable treatment alongside drugs and other forms of therapy. Although the pre-eminence of Bath cannot be denied, this book offers to widen the scope of the culture of water-taking and examines the great variety of watering places, spas and wells in eighteenth-century British medicine and literature. It offers to veer away from a glamorous image of Georgian Bath refinement and elegant sociability to give a more ambivalent and diverse description of watering places in the long eighteenth century. The book starts by reasserting the centrality of sickness in spa culture, and goes on to examine the dangers of mineral water treatment. The notion of ‘murky waters’ constitutes a closely followed thread in the five chapters that evolve in concentric circles, from sick bodies to financial structures. The idea of ‘murkiness’ is an invitation to consider the material and metaphorical aspect of mineral waters, and disassociate them from ideas of cleanliness, transparency, well-being and refinement that twenty-first-century readers spontaneously associate with spas. At the crossroads between medical history, literary studies and cultural studies, this study delves into a great variety of primary sources, probing into the academic medical discourse on the mineral components of British wells, as well as the multiple forms of literature associated with spas (miscellanies, libels and lampoons, songs, travel narratives, periodicals and novels) to examine the representation of spas in eighteenth-century British culture.
that the poor, who would ‘come flocking’ to take the waters for their health, would have to be kept apart from the bon ton , who happened to come for the same reason, so that the reputation of the spa would be maintained. I will explore, at the end of this chapter, the ways in which the juxtaposition of the two was dealt with and represented in contemporary literature. High stakes In the creative 1732 issue of The Scarborough Miscellany , a familiar reference at this stage, a mock-heroic poem entitled
Phyllis Hembry's systematic 1990 investigation into English spas remains the referential scholarly work on the subject. Eighteenth-century printed texts on Bath are copious and diverse, ranging from medical treatises and controversies to songs and satirical poems. By contrast, the publications on the remaining 345 spas, springs and watering places vary greatly in quantity, genre and tone. Some small cold-water spas, like St Mungo's Well in Yorkshire, generated a lot of medical literature, medium-sized spa towns like Scarborough had their own yearly publication of
Watering places offered a variety of entertainment outlets. Not only were they justified by the prolonged presence of patrons in need of distraction, but they were also repeatedly validated by the medical literature of the times. In his comments on the use of mineral waters, for example, William Buchan prescribed exercise for drinkers and bathers: ‘The best kind of exercise are those connected with amusement. Everything that tends to exhilarate the spirits, not only promotes the operation of the waters, but acts as a medicine
mineral waters did not unfold solely in medical treatises, borrowing from other theoretical frameworks and blending with chemistry, natural history and travel literature. 2 Finally, the development of medical institutions such as the General Infirmary in Bath remained restricted to the major spas, that is to say, less than 5 per cent of the mineral waters available to the sick. 3 Although the notion of medicalisation should be
. Spa towns, big or small, attracted ailing persons, whose sick bodies had often tried another drug, or, like Hume, another mineral water. Starting with the most widespread spa narratives of eighteenth-century Britain, Austen, Smollett and Burney, this chapter revisits the representation of spa towns in literature and medicine to investigate the ways in which sick bodies inhabited them. It therefore starts with a few Bath examples, only to establish that even in Bath sickness was central, and not necessarily feigned as a pretext to go to the spa. After shifting the
pharmakon . The multiple cautionary directions found in medical treatises to follow medical prescriptions and to prepare the patient's body before taking the waters testify to an overall confidence in the effectiveness of a water treatment, which was a risk in itself because of the strength of the remedy. Conversely, some critics of medicinal spas saw them as a mere cure-all. In medical and satirical literature alike, angry authors recurrently warned their readers against the ill consequences of quack remedies and charlatanism, and mineral waters were not left behind. In