Salt Water Is Not a Metaphor

The sea has been on prescription since 1750. Some of the prescription still holds.

A skipper in Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales (1934) claims to know "a cure for everything: salt water." Then he names its forms: "Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea." Europe has spent more than two and a half centuries trying to prescribe it.

It began as British medicine. In 1750 Dr. Richard Russell published a Latin dissertation recommending seawater for diseases of the glands, bathing in it and drinking it. In English it ran to six editions. Russell moved his practice to a fishing village on the shingle. The town, now Brighton, grew up around his prescription pad. So, in time, did the English seaside. By 1796 Margate had a hospital where London's poor came to be bathed in the sea.

France gave it a word. Dr. Joseph La Bonnardière coined thalassothérapie, sea treatment, in his medical thesis of 1865. By the end of the century Louis Bagot had opened an institute at Roscoff, on the granite north coast of Brittany, where patients were treated in heated seawater.

THE CHAMPION'S CURE

The modern version starts with a cyclist. Louison Bobet had won three Tours de France and a world title. In late 1961 a car crash broke his femur and his ankle. He spent two weeks of his recovery in the seawater at Roscoff.

In 1964 he opened a thalassotherapy institute of his own at Quiberon, a thin peninsula on Brittany's south coast, with a hotel attached.

France never wrote the discipline into law. A voluntary standard, published in 2013, asks only that the sea be in it: its climate, its water, its mud and its algae.

The packaged claims of thalassotherapy, that seawater's minerals pass through the skin and treat disease, have never been convincingly shown. France's own consumer magazine, Que Choisir, calls the cure a medicine of comfort. What does hold up are the things the institutes bundle: exercise in water, cold and warm baths, coastal air and light, rest, sleep, and weeks away from the desk. The first of those has its own essay in this journal, The Sport That Doesn't Spend You.

Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea. Start with the third.