Rawley Springs and Massanetta Mineral Springs Company

Rawley Springs is an unincorporated community in Rockingham County, 9 miles west of Harrisonburg, Virginia, and was once known for its lavish medical resort. European men began to settle the land in the early 19th century. One of the earliest settlers was Benjamin Smith, who sent his wife Elizabeth to the springs for her health in 1810. Doctors were perplexed on what was causing her illness, but within six weeks of staying at the springs and drinking the water she was cured. Shortly after, people began to set up summer camps by the springs. Joseph Hicks is credited for purchasing land and officially advertising the small village as a resort community in 1824.
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A Day at the Beach? Mothers at the Children’s Seashore House

– by Meggie Crnic, Senior Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania

 

As I carried the hefty, bound volumes to my research station, I wondered what stories they might reveal.  Unwrapping the protective covers, I maneuvered a book to examine its spine. It was a Children’s Seashore House (CSH) patient log book from the 1920s.

From my previous research I knew that the CSH was a pediatric hospital in Atlantic City, NJ. It opened in 1872 to care for Philadelphia’s children who could not otherwise afford time at the seashore. The CSH was a beachfront institution where physicians used “marine medication,” to care for children with a range of pediatric disorders. At the hospital children experienced sea-air, sea-water, and sun bathing as their therapies. Elite medical research supported marine medication and prominent physicians on both sides of the Atlantic prescribed patients time at the shore. The belief in the curative and restorative powers of marine environments transcended national, cultural, religious, and class boundaries. It also gave rise to a vast network of pediatric seashore hospitals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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Atlantic City as a winter resort

This month we are heading down to Atlantic City, New Jersey. Atlantic City has been known as a summertime resort since it was incorporated in 1854. The first hotel was the Belloe house, built in 1853, and has been home to the Miss American Pageant.  The city was the inspiration for the board game Monopoly.

Many of us may know Atlantic City as a summertime resort, but did you know it also advertised itself as a winter resort for its “sanitary effect upon diseases and invalids?”

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William Osler, Medicine, and Fairy Tales

– by Wood Institute travel grantee Ryan Habermeyer*

 

Several years ago, in a daze of dissertation research, I stumbled upon a passing comment by William Osler, pioneer of modern medicine: “To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment.” What a curious coupling, fairy tales and medicine. As much as I tried to forget it and press forward with my dissertation I kept returning to that idea. How is pathology a bedfellow to fairy tales?

Here is my best conclusion: For centuries, disease was almost indistinguishable from magic – spontaneous, metamorphic, at times exotic, powerful, and mysterious. For centuries, disease provoked both wonder and fear; it elicited a kind of grotesque enchantment. Disease, I like to think Osler is suggesting, tells a story. It has traceable beginnings, chaotic middles and dramatic ends. To us, the victims, it is the villain which must be vanquished; but I imagine if diseases could talk they would cast themselves as the heroes and heroines struggling to survive against impossible odds.

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Sharon Springs

This month we are visiting Schoharie County, New York! The village of Sharon Springs is west of Albany and is near attractions such as Howe Caverns, Adirondack Park, Catskill Park, Fenimore Art Museum and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Sharon Springs, before European settlement, was frequented by the Iroquois population for the spring’s natural healing waters. Major European settlement began in 1825 with the establishment of a boarding house opened by David Eldredge.

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Faith, Superstition or Insanity?

– by Wood Institute travel grantee Alexandra Prince*

 

If you meet a new acquaintance at a party and one of the first things they share about themselves is their membership in a newly-formed religious group, you are going to assume a few things. You might be polite enough to mask your raised eyebrows with an innocent follow-up question such as, “What is the name of the group?” Or, “What is it that you believe exactly?” But I bet that, behind your polite inquiry, you are likely wondering if they might be crazy, or if they are nuts or have a screw loose or suffer from a mental illness, or any other variety of descriptive phrases or terms we assign to people whose minds we deem not to be “normal.”

My research at the Historical Medical Library at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in the spring of 2018 concerned the history behind this presumption that members in new religious movements are insane or somehow mentally unsound. Where did this link between religion and pathology emerge? And why are we so quick to assign mental illness to those who espouse divergent religious beliefs? To better understand the pathological frameworks we often use when discussing religion, my dissertation examines how this assumption was historically shaped. To do so, I examined the Library’s collection of archival documents relating to religion and madness during the nineteenth century.

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