An Enemy of the People? Medicine, industry and tourism in Spain (19th and 20th centuries)

Abstract

In 1817, the creation in Spain of the “Cuerpo de Médicos Directores de Baños” was justified by the need to identify hydromineral remedies and to ensure their proper administration. The measure allowed this new group of experts the ability to choose where and how they wanted to play their new role. The plurality of approaches about spa functions leads to different interpretations about their physicians’ role, either as promoters of the balneary industry or as an obstacle for the development of the touristic aspects of the business. This work will focus on the diversity of spas and the doctors that work there, their collective and individual interests and how both linked with business as far as their synergies and antagonisms. This analysis would be relevant in understanding the scientific and institutional framework as well as the development of an academic discourse around touristic and recreational aspects that stem from the use of the mineral waters. The medicalization of the mineral waters and the subsequent creation of the spa resort conferred an important role to the medical directors in this new industry, often in a real opposition to the economic interests of the owners, although at some points their interests overlapped. Chemical analyzes of water were among the activities they carried out, to which environmental studies were added in order to build medical topographies of the spa resort area. Both activities claimed to have had an effect on health tourism, convinced of the different benefits and specificity of every spa resort. The consequence was that this kind of scientific literature linked healing with environmental conditions that transcended the actual value of water. Halfway between the functions of propaganda and control, between medicalization and tourism, these two groups –bath owners and medical directors- staged a permanent conflict that became known as “the balneary freedom” which led to the Cuerpo’s  Suppression in 1932 and its replacement —after the Civil War— by an inspectorate of bathing establishments.