From spas to psychedelics: The history of 'wellness'

The idea of a spa treatment is nothing new. Photo / Getty Images

Pre-pandemic, the wellness economy was worth US$4.2tn, according to the Global Wellness Institute. It's a contemporary obsession now addressed by two British writers, each of whom has set out to explore the origins of wellness. Their two journeys share a vast breadth of historical scope, though their cultural coordinates differ wildly. As bookends for a curious investigation, they make compelling counterparts.

In 'Health, Hedonism & Hypochondria', academic and theologian Ian Bradley focuses his gaze on spas, the "pioneers of the vast modern wellness industry". He begins with Greek and Roman thermal mineral springs, and ends with a rather sad tour of the one-time pinnacles of European spa grandeur (now eclipsed by beach resorts in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean). Building these temples to physical health, Bradley posits, also laid a foundation for a broader social and cultural understanding of wellbeing.

In Retreat, journalist Matthew Ingram also puts therapeutic bolt-holes at the heart of his investigations. But his are retreats formed in the crucible of the countercultural explorations of the Beat Generation, the anti-psychiatrists and the hippies who took eastern philosophies and epically reinterpreted them through a "constellation" of 19th- and 20th-century thinkers and movements including Nietzsche, Gandhi, Wilhelm Reich and psychoanalysis. "It takes the gestalt of the counterculture," he says, "to bring about their coalescence."

Bradley's is a study of western civilis­ation's indulge-punish relationship with spa culture. The pendulum swings from Roman and Greek sensuality to Christian restraint, and from the religious fanaticism of the Middle Ages to the ritualistic drinking cures championed by Protestant Reformers. Bradley then takes us from 18th-century social hubs (with balls, gambling and concerts) and Belle Époque temples of indulgence to medicalised centres for hydrotherapy and exercise: "the precursors of modern aerobics, Pilates and weight training".

'Health, Hedonism & Hypochondria' also delivers a gossipy romp through the "secret or shadow side" of spas — the sex and the shenanigans. Bradley sums up this salacious dimension by embracing the German word Kurschatten, "generally used to describe the romantic and amorous dalliances that regularly took place in spas during their golden age". Not so much steam room as steamy room.

This not only gives a surprising pep; it also reveals how wellness entered the mainstream through another channel — culture, as the dramas of spa life were captured in 18th- and 19th-century literature and music. Think of Jane Austen's novels featuring society's decampment to the spa town of Bath, Johann Strauss's flirtatious opera Die Fledermaus, set in "a spa near Vienna", or Dostoyevsky's The Gambler, set in the fictional German spa of Roulettenberg.

Here Bradley's and Ingram's narratives overlap. As Ingram says, quoting an editor's letter in macrobiotic magazine Seed: "The greatest influence on young people today is the music world, and it is from this that the influence to eat organic and healthy foods must come." If the writers and composers Bradley references were the Beats, Beatles or Bowies of their day, his implication that spa culture became ingrained in the psyche through music and literature dovetails with that of Ingram.

Retreat is a riot of a read. Ingram's exploration of how psychoanalysis and psychedelics fused with meditation, mysticism and spiritual awakening to oil the cogs of the contemporary wellness economy is both forensic and radically irreverent. George Ohsawa, father of macrobiotics, is described as "brilliant, possibly insane". Freud, as LSD culture is traced back to psychoanalysis, is said to act like "a jerk". In Ingram's examination of the influence of Buddhism and the Tao, Chogyam Trungpa, founder of America's first Buddhist university is "fascinating, if unpalatable". Timothy Leary, co-author of The Psychedelic Experience and a somewhat messianic LSD activist, is called a "lunatic" and "manifestation . . . of insanity". And then there's Charles Manson.

Sigmund Freud is featured in a new book on the history of wellness. Photo / Getty Images

Together, the two books paint a fascinating picture of the construction of these shrines to wellness — and of a new quasi-religion

As these ideas come together and morph, so the titular retreats also transform. With the rise of LSD culture, trippy HQs emerge, such as Leary's Millbrook in New York state and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest author Ken Kesey's Santa Cruz escape La Honda, home of "The Acid Tests". Then there are the anti-psychiatry centres: David Cooper's Villa 21 near St Albans, and Ronnie Laing's Kingsley Hall in east London.

When experimentation goes too far, retreats take the form of medical recovery hubs, such as David Smith's Haight-Ashbury free clinic. And with the counterculture's "abandonment of LSD for meditation", they evolve again. In California, Esalen was founded on the "organising principle" of Tantra, the "anti-ascetic Hindu philosophy", and influenced by the work of Abe Maslow, whose Hierarchy of Needs pyramid culminates in "self-actualisation" — the pinnacle of wellness optimisation.

Together, the two books paint a fascinating picture of the construction of these shrines to wellness — and of a new quasi-religion. "Today's concept of wellness is geared around not so much health as the absence of disease," says Ingram. At a time of collective obsession with not only ridding ourselves of a global virus but also of finding the mental and spiritual fortitude to survive the chaos in its wake, they couldn't feel more timely.

- Financial Times