HEALING WATERS
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It was Thomas Guidott, a Hampshire-born, Oxford-educated physician of Italian descent, who we have to thank for helping popularise the concept of spa towns. As our previous article recounts, even the Romans were convinced of the healing properties of hot spring waters, yet it wasn’t until Guidott’s rigorous (for the 17th century, at least) studies that the public bought into the science behind it and towns with natural springs began to promote themselves as a wellness destination and build an infrastructure around it.
Despite engaging in a seemingly gentle endeavour, Guidott met with plenty of opposition to his studies after setting up his practice in Bath in 1668. As historian John Britton brilliantly noted, the physician had “a most thorough contempt for quackery” and refused to shy away from those who contested. The chapters broke down the individual minerals he had discovered in the town’s naturally-occurring spa waters and helped turn on a generation of aristocratic English society to their apparent curative properties.
