In Quest of a Cure: Literary and Medical Cultures of the Health Resort

People have always traveled for health, but as industrial pollution increased in nineteenth-century Britain, doctors started ordering their patients abroad in ever-growing numbers. This work explores the intensity and sheer strangeness of life in these colonies, governed by illness, but where patients (before the rise of the sanatorium) could move around freely, and even indulge in winter sports. Focusing on Menton on the Riviera and Davos in the Swiss Alps, from the 1860s to the 1920s, In Quest of a Cure explores the literary and medical cultures of these resorts.

Blending medical and literary history and analysis, Sally Shuttleworth looks in depth at the lives and writings of literary invalids, leading up to an extended study of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, placed in the medical and literary context of Davos life. Other literary lives and fiction explored include John Addington Symonds, Robert Louis Stevenson, Katherine Mansfield, Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, Olive Schreiner, Vernon Lee, "new woman" novelist Beatrice Harraden, and Llewelyn Powys.