In Quest of a Cure: Literary and Medical Cultures of the Health Resort
Jan 2026 · Oxford University Press
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People have always travelled for health, but as industrial pollution increased in nineteenth-century Britain, doctors started ordering their patients abroad in ever-growing numbers. Self-styled 'English Colonies' sprung up, not in the far-reaches of the Empire, but in health resorts in the heart of Europe. 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: the lives, conflicting emotions, and writings of the patients and their carers, and the changing patterns of medical treatment. Many of the patients ordered to winter abroad had tuberculosis, but others were cases of nervous disorders, or sufferers from 'overwork', what we would now call burnout, all hoping to be cured once placed in the right climatic environment. Blending medical and literary history and analysis, Sally Shuttleworth looks in depth at the lives and writings of literary invalids, including John Addington Symonds, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Katherine Mansfield, 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 Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, Olive Schreiner, Vernon Lee, 'new woman' novelist Beatrice Harraden, and Llewelyn Powys. In Quest of a Cure considers the pleasures as well as the pains of medical exile, and the close bonds which often developed between doctor and patient. Medical climatology, as it was called, is a discarded science, but its prescription of fresh air, exercise, and sunshine brought about a revolution in medical practices at the time. In its understanding of the relationship between individual health and surrounding environment, it offers new perspectives for us to think about the challenges of current times.
People have always travelled for health, but as industrial pollution increased in nineteenth-century Britain, doctors started ordering their patients abroad in ever-growing numbers. Self-styled 'English Colonies' sprung up, not in the far-reaches of the Empire, but in health resorts in the heart ...
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About the author
Sally Shuttleworth CBE, FBA, is Senior Research Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford, and the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, where she was previously Head of the Humanities Division. She has also taught at the universities of Princeton, Leeds, and Sheffield. She has published extensively on literature, science, and medicine:previous books include The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science and Medicine, 1840-1900 (OUP, 2010, winner of the British Society for Literature and Science Prize), and the co-authored work Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain(Pittsburgh, 2019).
Sally Shuttleworth CBE, FBA, is Senior Research Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford, and the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, where she was previously Head of the Humanities Division. She has also taught at the universities of Princeton, Leeds, and Sheffield...
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