Healed by Water: American Hydropathy and the Search for Meaning in Nature
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English Language and Literature
First Advisor
Smith, Caleb
Abstract
How does water shape our understanding of our bodies, the way that we relate to one another, the natural world, and even to ourselves? “Healed by Water” seeks to answer these questions through an exploration of American hydropathy, a nineteenth-century medical practice which believed water to be a universal cure. Situating my study of the conceptual underpinnings of hydropathy within a chorus of different socioeconomic and cultural occurrences of the nineteenth-century such as a rising interest in self-improvement, urbanization, and the expansion of the market economy, I retell the stories of individuals for whom water offered a sense of direction amidst the turbulence; for them, witnessing and cultivating a transformative relationship with water was essential for claiming an authentic sense of self as well as interpersonal and national belonging. Drawing a constellation among the medical humanities, literature, history, and philosophy of science, I trace the emergence of an ecological awareness which arises from attending to the movements and agency of water in the healing process. In so doing, my dissertation shows how this watery perception was instrumental in affirming the vitality of those often relegated to positions of passivity, as well as revising the definition of self-sovereignty which was frequently rooted in matrices of domination and unequal distribution of power. For example, in the first chapter, I focus on Walt Whitman’s “Manly Health and Training” in which he directly quotes from and engages with hydropathic texts (such as cold-water bathing) in conceptualizing the stalwart and able body. Juxtaposing my analysis with a reading of his poem, “This Compost,” I show that Whitman’s democratic self emerges from a mutual beholding of self and other, and how such selfhood is paradoxically strengthened by its ability to mediate and flow. The second chapter grapples with the hydropathic work of David Ruggles, a Black abolitionist who believed that water had fine-tuned his senses to detect electrical currents upon the skin. For Ruggles, water offered a way of relating and perceiving beyond the ocular; such a healing practice countered the claims made by polygenists who described skin color as resulting from the difference in the bodily regulation of fluids (like perspiration and some liquid serum within the skin that collected pigment). Continuing to think about how water shaped the perceived differences between bodies, the final chapter delves into the feminization of fluidity within the cultural and medical imaginations of the nineteenth-century, and how the hydropath Mary Gove Nichols reclaimed such watery associations to illuminate the ways in which a woman’s embodied experience is key to understanding how all beings—in human society and the cosmos—are related to one another in associations of love. My focus on water therefore recognizes how marginalized Americans such as Ruggles and Gove Nichols affirmed surprising yet vital kinships in resistance to structures of division, found radical healing amidst violence, and made space for different kinds of agencies and intelligences. At its heart, “Healed by Water” argues that the intimacy with the nonhuman world that a healing relationship with water called for invites us to go beyond the idea that self-sovereignty is contingent upon self-containment, or clear delineations of the boundaries of oneself. That is, the hydropathic framework offers a look into individual agency as informed by water’s own nonhuman intelligence, and how one’s sense of self-sovereignty is interdependent with the natural world and other beings. In thinking about how such a model of collaborative and mutually empowering selfhood reconstructs the ways in which individuals are connected together, “Healed by Water” envisions how a watery awareness may bring us one step closer toward going beyond thinking of ourselves and each other as isolated by the boundaries of our bodies, and sensing the enlivening bonds of kinship with other beings in the human, nonhuman, and more than human world.
Recommended Citation
Yang, Helen, "Healed by Water: American Hydropathy and the Search for Meaning in Nature" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1461.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1461
