Overview

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 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.

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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. She is the autor of The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science and Medicine, 1840-1900 (winner of the British Society for Literature and Science Prize), and coauthor of Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain. As a retired board-certified music therapist, licensed counselor, and veteran of the Michigan Opera and several community theaters, Jennifer Dixon has explored the power of words and music to motivate, inspire, provoke, soothe, and heal-all of which she brings to her work as an audiobook narrator. Even though she was born within the sound of Bow Bells in London England (now residing in the beautiful state of Michigan), Jennifer has a ""proper old-fashioned BBC sound, with American overtones,"" but can conjure up her cockney side if need be!

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