The Rhetoric of Hydropathy and Lay Medical Agency in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain

This essay examines a neglected archive of hydropathic memoirs to reconstruct the lay experience of seeking medical agency in the full-fledged alternative medical market in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Two main texts under examination are Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Confessions of a Water Patient (1845) and J. Leech's Three Weeks between Wet Sheets; the Diary and Doings of a Moist Visitor to Malvern (1851). While Bulwer-Lytton's encomium for hydropathy features an invalid subject's journey toward a holistic sense of self-command, Leech's satire undermines this empowerment by exposing the anxieties of navigating the market as a medical consumer. Situating the rhetoric of hydropathy within the context of the medical marketplace, this essay illuminates the ways in which the period's alternative health practices, with their shared vision of self-reliant, natural health, offered consumer options primed for the expression of authentic selfhood and the exercise of medical self-governance.