Modern Ancients: temporality in writings of the 1st half of the 19th century on the Cold Water Cure

Abstract

The article examines the temporalizing rhetorical devices used in water cure manuals of the 1840s. Following in the footsteps of Johannes Fabian, temporalization is understood as referring to a plethora of ways in which relations of time can be constructed in a text. Often rather than not, these relations place the modern self in opposition to ‘archaic’ Others. The cold water cure, an alternative treatment mode that gained popularity in Europe and the USA in the frst half of the nineteenth century, saw its Other above all in the ofcial medicine of the era. The latter’s therapeutic staples – bleeding the patient and administering medicaments including mercury compounds – were described in water cure brochures as ‘medieval’ or ‘barbaric’ methods. The authors of hydropathic manuals also saw their progressive values as in opposition to those of illiterate peasants, with whom the cold water cure reportedly originated. The article focuses on the contradictory temporality ascribed to water cure, which was relegated to the past through associations with both Classical antiquity (Hippocratic humor medicine) and peasant culture, portrayed as all but ‘prehistoric’, but at the same time it is in water cure that hopes for a better medical future lay, according to the authors of manuals. This paradoxical entangling of the up-to-date and the archaic is discussed as a characteristic feature of western modernity, which tends to produce the ‘old’ as a potential source of the ‘new’. A special emphasis is placed on representations of the ‘father’ of the cold water cure, Vincenz Priessnitz and the way his ideas are interpreted in his followers’ texts.