March 23, 2024 • 39 mins
The idea of healing via immersion in sacred or special waters dates back to prehistory, and it’s still alive and well in the modern world. In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe consider the myth, history and reality and healing waters. (originally published 03/23/2023)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. We're going
into the vault. Going down to the vault. This is
part four of our series called The Washing of the Waters.
This episode originally published on March twenty third, twenty twenty three,
and I think it closes out this series, so we
hope you enjoy.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with the
fourth and final part of our series on the Healing Waters,
the belief held by many throughout history that you could
cure your illnesses and improve your health by bathing or
immersing yourself in water, often water with special properties, maybe
(01:03):
water of a certain temperature like hot baths or cold baths,
or water from a special source such as a particular
warm mineral spring. Now. In previous episodes, as a brief refresher,
we talked about the prehistoric emergence of bathing culture and
the ancient religious associations between bathing and spiritual purity in
(01:26):
the realm of healing. We talked about ancient Greek and
Roman theories of medicine, such as humoral theory, which sometimes
had the consequence of recommending bathing as a cure for
all sorts of health problems, and we also talked about
the importance of baths and spas in the culture and
civic infrastructure of the Roman Empire. We discussed some interesting
(01:47):
and strange examples of spas with alleged healing powers that
contain living organisms such as blood worms or fish, that
are themselves thought to in some way be a mechanism
of healing. And in the episode just previous to this one,
we discussed and I thought fascinating medical history paper from
a few decades back analyzing records of treatment that made
(02:10):
use of the thermal waters of Bath, England, and this
paper argued that while yeah, most of the conditions people
thought could be cured by bathing in hot springs throughout
history were probably just benefiting from the placebo effect, there
is pretty decent evidence for thinking that the immersion treatments
at Bath were genuinely directly effective at curing paralysis caused
(02:33):
by chronic lead poisoning. Because according to the author, sitting
up to your neck in warm water increases the rate
in which your body purges lead content through urine. Anyway,
after all that, we're back today to finish off this
series with a few more interesting tidbits. Now, one of
the things I did want to briefly talk about is
(02:53):
that a lot of the mineral springs with alleged healing
powers that we've mentioned so far have been in places
that were formerly part of the Roman Empire. And I
think this should not be surprising, given the importance of
bathing in Roman culture in general, but especially in the
Greek and Roman theories of medicine we discussed in the
(03:14):
previous parts of the series, and in fact you can
still see the lingering effects of this. There are alleged
healing spas all throughout Europe that go way way back
that can be traced back to Roman times. But I
don't think we should assume that the association of some
forms of bathing with healing is just like an odd
(03:34):
unique belief contingent on some amount of Roman cultural heritage,
because I think it seems that people in many places
around the world, at various times, have come to think
that they can be healed by bathing, by bathing in
general or through the specific waters of some particular mineral spring.
(03:55):
And so you can find examples of this from around
the world. There was one that I ended up doing
kind of a deep dive on. I was reading about
the Kittigata Hot Springs of Uganda. So the Kittigata Hot
Springs are They're a system of geothermal springs in southwest Uganda.
I've seen the name Kittygata translated as both warm water
(04:16):
and as warm place or good place. And there is
a town of the same name located about two kilometers
northwest of the springs. And these waters are said to
collect in two side by side pools, and they are
believed by many to have healing properties, so much so
that they are or at least they were, as of
(04:38):
the sources I was reading, which were some Uganda newspaper
articles from roughly ten years ago or so. At that time,
they were being visited by hundreds of people every day,
both locals and tourists, tourists from within Uganda and tourists internationally.
And I was reading about the springs in a series
of articles from a Ugandan English language newspaper called new Vision,
(05:02):
which is based out of Kampala. So one of the
articles is called the Healing Hot Springs. It was published
in February twenty fourteen by Chris Mugasha. And in this
article the author actually describes a visit he had to
the springs and describes some basic facts about them and
sort of how they're used by the people. So Rabbi
(05:22):
attached them pictures of the Kiddy Gotta Springs. You can
see that they are surrounded by some very interesting rock formations.
I don't know exactly what sort of geology forms the
rocks like this, but you can see that all around
the pools there are these strange, beautiful, interesting kind of
like crags poking up in all directions.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, the sense of the rocks being burst
out by swelling from beneath.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Yeah. So, according to Mugasha's article here, the springs are
divided into a section that's used by men, and then
a section used by women and children. And then also
there are some people who don't actually want to stay
and bathe in person with everybody else. And he says
they bring jerry cans and fill them up with hot
spring water to carry back home, and the thermal pools
(06:11):
also vary by temperature. There's one area that apparently has
comfortably warm water, while the other has water that the
author describes as hot enough to prepare porridge or cook
an egg.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Yeah, this is a feature of various hot springs that
I was reading about, just because as the hot spring
doesn't mean you can or should get into it. There's
some very dangerous hot springs out there in the world,
and you should definitely obey any signage or rules and
regulations surrounding them. But then there are also plenty of
complexes where if you know the right place to go
(06:45):
in a spring complex, then you'll be all right because
that's where the water will be warm and not hot
enough to cook eggs.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Right, And it seemed from what I was reading that
the area with water hot enough to cook an egg
may still be used for some things, but I doubt
people are like getting in in that water and hanging
out there for a long time, because you don't want
to be the egg.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Though this is in this topic, this is not something
I researched, but this might be something we might have
to put a pin in to come back to in
discussing like the history of cooking, you know, because we've
talked about the importance of natural springs, both hot and cold,
to ancient peoples. I wonder how this factors or doesn't
factor into the history of boiling as a cooking method.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
I have no idea, but that is an interesting question. Yeah,
maybe before we had fire, did anybody ever try to
like boil their food in a hot spring? I don't
know what evidence of that there would be left over.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
If they did. Yeah, that would be the thing, right anyway.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
So the author here says that people visit the springs
for multiple reasons. So some people it's it seems to
be just recreational. People come for pleasure and relaxation and
the hot waters. Maybe they come after work to chill out,
or they come to admire the area's natural beauty. But
he says that the majority of people there are looking
for healing of some kind. And an earlier article in
(08:06):
the same newspaper I read in New Vision. This article
was by Ali Wasswa from August twenty thirteen, mentions people
coming to the springs hoping for cures to a wide
range of health issues, both minor and severe. So this
includes everything from acne to cancer and While many people
claim to have experienced improvements after bathing in the water,
(08:29):
Wasswa's article cites some doubts about the efficacy of these
cures from a researcher named Moses Kakaya who was affiliated
with an organization called Save for Health Uganda that appears
to be a Ugandan public health Inngo, and the article
says that this team investigated the springs and said they
found the waters had no special healing properties. Mugasha's article
(08:53):
mentions that to the extent the waters do have any
healing properties, if they do, those could possibly be based
in specific mineral contents of the water. We've discussed some
possibilities of those kinds with other springs, but also the
claims of healing could simply be from the heat of
the water, feeling good, alleviating pain and swollen joints and
(09:14):
things like that, or just from easing stress, you know,
helping people relax and other quote psychotherapeutic effects. Now, this
article and another article also by Mugasha from the month
before mention threats to the springs, which is something I
think we haven't really thought about that much yet, but
that hot springs are not necessarily an eternal phenomenon or
(09:39):
even a semi eternal phenomenon, because even though they are
heated by the rocks from deep down below they you know,
they still are subject to hydrodynamic effects and so like
changes of what's going on where water drains, where water
goes can affect how a hot spring works. And so
these two articles mention some threat to the springs. So
(10:01):
the article from a month before by the same author
reports complaints from locals that construction from a nearby highway
has had negative effects on the springs. Basically, it seems
that they're claiming water from a nearby wetland system was
diverted because of roadwork and this has led to flooding
of the spring. And of course flooding of the spring
(10:24):
is like mixing water from other sources, which causes the
water to become tepid.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Nobody wants to travel to a tepid spring.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Yeah, And the later article by Mugasha also mentions changes
in weather patterns due to climate change possibly having an
effect because changing rain patterns mean that the increased flooding
of the nearby river also means that it runs over
into the spring, and this results. I think if I'm
(10:52):
understanding right once again with the river water coming into
the spring water and you know, kind of like diluting it.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Yeah, absolutely to your point of these springs like those
are environmental conditions and they can be altered either intentionally
or accidentally exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
And so this article describes people who were local people
who were trying to protect the spring having to like
stack up essentially sort of sandbags, like bags of gravel
to try to block the flow, the inflow of water
from other sources into the spring.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Now I was trying to find a scientific paper directly
testing the alleged healing properties of this spring in particular
because again, you know, one of the articles mentions an
investigation by that Ugandan public Health NGO about its medical properties.
I didn't come across anything, so I can't comment with
any confidence about whether these springs would have any health
(11:47):
effects other than placebo. But especially since that paper we
read in the last episode arguing that that SPA therapy
could have actual effects on chronic lead poisoning in particular,
and again that was the art, was that it worked
by increasing the rate at which lad as purge from
the body through urine. I wonder, you know, I wonder
if there are other conditions where people might be getting
(12:10):
some health improvements through a surprising mechanism other than just maybe, say,
you know, the very real effects of relaxing in nice
warm water.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Yeah, you always have to at least keep the door
open to such a possibility, even if in many cases
it seems perhaps unlikely based on what we understand currently. Now,
as long as we're speaking about, you know, other international
examples of healing waters, I felt like we should at
least acknowledge that the River Ganges in India and Bangladesh
(12:41):
has long been held as a traditional place of healing
via immersion. Again, not a natural you know, spring, hot
spring and could spring, et cetera, but a great river.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Yeah. This is actually a subtopic that I became very
interested in when we first started looking at the series.
But then I got kind of overwhelmed, and I like, oh,
it seems like the Ganges would have to be an
entire series on its own.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
Yeah. Absolutely, there's just so much to it. You've got
glacier snow and permafrost melt. You've got discussions of supposedly
beneficial bacteriophages, antibiotic resistant bacteria that are not beneficial. Then
you have to deal with topics such as pollution as
well as all of this on top of a rich
(13:26):
tradition of religious significance. So yeah, I think it's something
we'd have to come back to and cover in more
depth in the future. But at the same time, we
didn't want to give the impression that we were just
overlooking it right now. Another example of spring and spa
culture I wanted to bring up, just briefly, is, of
course Japan. Japan has a very rich tradition of spas
(13:48):
and thermal springs, and I believe we previously alluded to
the Japanese macaques who famously immersed themselves in hot springs
and also do so communally. So that's a great example
non human primates engaging in this very activity that humans
have enjoyed for so long. So I've read that they're
somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty five thousand hot spring
(14:10):
sources or on sen throughout Japan. I got an email
recently about a tour of hot springs in Japan eighteen
days long. Looked amazing, but just you know, it basically
shows that, yeah, you can travel to Japan and largely
just do hot springs and it'll be enough to fill
eighteen days worth of travel. Now, one in particular that
(14:33):
I thought was pretty interesting, and I have to stress
this is not actually an example of a spring system
where you can do much or really any bathing. But
it's called Chinoki Jigoku, and it's in Bepou, Japan. And
here you'll find the aid Hells of Bepu. I think
(14:53):
I've sometimes seen the count of seven, but I believe
eight is the right count. There's and these are translated,
of course from the Japanese. There's sea hell, white pond hell,
devil mountain hell, mountain Hell, alligator hell, cooking pot hell,
which this is actually the case cooking pod hell. These
are all thermal springs and is the and as the
name implies, many of them are really hot. Cooking pot
(15:15):
hell is where you can actually cook food, and there
there's a long standing tradition of cooking food in this
particular thermal spring. There's tornado Hell, and then there is
blood pond hell or bloody hell. Pond.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
Is it red?
Speaker 1 (15:28):
It is very red. Yeah, you can look up pictures
of this. It's it's it's too hot to get into.
It's it's basically hot enough to cook food in itself.
It has a deep red color that I believe is
due to both like clay content and iron oxide.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
I would have assumed red bacteria.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
All of these these hells, all these ponds, these are
tourist destinations. You can go and visit them, and I
think they have if I'm understanding correctly from the information
I was looking at, they have smaller pools for like
soaking your feet in as a visitor. So even though
you can't stick your feet directly into many of these hells,
and I think Alligator hell As actually has alligators in it,
(16:08):
and you don't want to stick your feet in there either,
But at any rate, they do have some smaller pools
that I guess are fed or partially fed by the
actual spring waters that you can get your feet wet in.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
I had no idea that were alligators in Japan.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
They might be important. I'm not sure what their status is.
Oh interesting, they're definitely alligators here, no matter where they
came from. I don't care.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Where your alligators come from. I just want there to
be alligators. They've got to be alligators in Alligator hell.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Yes, I believe they come through on that front. All right, well,
let's get back into the healing waters though away from
the alligator waters and the egg boiling waters. So we've
(16:58):
already talked a bit in these episodes of about traditional
healing waters potentially having something specific in them, something in
the contents of the waters that enable healing in human bathers.
And in some cases these springs end up having something
in them that in some cases where a particular element
(17:20):
in the water is also utilized in modern medical treatments
one way or the other. So it's tempting to wonder, well,
if these springs maybe offer the same benefits for those
who simply immerse themselves in the water or drink of
the waters.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Okay, so not that this would happen, but for example,
it would be like, you know, a seedaminifen is the
is the active ingredient in thaileanol, And then maybe we discover, oh,
there is a spring that naturally has a seedamenifen content
in it, and you wonder if we're people like getting
their pretailenol thailanol from this spring.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Well, that would that would be a bad idea for
number obvious reasons there, thinking about you know, controlled dosages
of something in a general medication versus how much are
you getting out of the water, how much you can
if you're drinking it or potentially absorbing it through your skin.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
Yes, calibration of dosage would would seem to be a
big problem with this, So.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
So definitely something to keep in mind as we go
into a couple of specific examples, and I think they're
both pretty fun specific examples too, in that they both
have connections to our home state of Georgia. Here in
the United States, we don't often get to cover things
that are that are present in Georgia or Georgia history.
So we're going to start with lithia water. This is
(18:43):
mineral water marked by the presence of lithium salts. Now,
to be clear, most of what we're talking about with
lithia water concerns its consumption, though I have read that
sweet Water Park Hotel this is a luxury resort which
operated in Lithiu's Rings, Georgia during the heyday of lithium
water tourism. In Georgia's Douglas County also offered lithia vapor bats,
(19:08):
which we're said to be very popular. I included an
old illustration of what this I guess may have consisted
of for you here, Joe.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Okay, so what we're looking at here up here to
be wooden boxes in which men are situated with their
heads poking out of a hole in a wooden plank,
so it's like they're in a pillory, but well, I
guess without the wrists poking out, so it's just the
head poking out of the pillory. And then there is
steam shooting out of the edges of the box, so
you can you can tell it must be quite warm
(19:38):
and moist on the inside.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Yes, now none of this is going on today, but
I don't know. Do you ever make it up to
Sweetwater Creek State Park, Joe, this is the same area.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a great place.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Yeah, beautiful, beautiful place. But back in the day, back
at the like the the end of the eighteen hundreds
beginning of the nineteen hundreds, this was a very popular
destination for well to do folks such as the Vanderbilts
such as Mark Twain. This particular Sweetwater Park Hotel was
again luxury resort. People came from all over to partake
(20:15):
of the of the healing powers of Lithia waters. The
hotel burned down in nineteen twelve, so you know it's
not even there as a historical location anymore.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
This is funny that you mentioned Mark Twain, because he
also came up in a in a research tangent that
I ended up not including. But he he wrote a
piece about a place like a spa. He went to
somewhere in Europe. I think it was in France, and
it's called I don't even know how to pronounce the
name of this place. The name it was called ai X.
Do you know how you say that?
Speaker 1 (20:45):
I do not.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Let's call it I. He went to I in I
think it's France, and he wrote a piece about it
called I Paradise of the Rheumattics. So I guess Twain
was into veryvarious kinds of like hot wet healing.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Yeah. Well, and he was very well traveled for the day.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
So I was reading a little bit more about this
whole fad around lithio waters, and I was reading a
paper titled Lithium Treatment in Clinical Medicine History, Current Status
in Future Use, published in the Journal of Cell Science
and Therapy in twenty seventeen by Duval and Galachio. And
this was interesting point out that lithia water became a
(21:28):
health fad around eighteen fifty and was especially big and
again the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds. It
was thought to treat gout, anxiety, various nervous conditions, and
a whole slew of other ailments. So a similar situation
that we found, you know, discussing any of these healing waters.
What does it treat? Well? What you got going on? Right?
Speaker 2 (21:52):
A lot of things. So it's interesting they mentioned gout
because that did come up in the paper about Bath,
specifically as one of the lead poisoning associated conditions that
the physicians at Bath thought could be cured by long
periods of immersion. But another thing about gout at Bath
was one of the purposes of like recording all this
(22:16):
data at the charity hospital there to say, you know,
we really can prove that these waters are providing a benefit,
was to try to attract rich patients who had gout.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
Well. It is often referred to as the disease of kings, right, yeah,
disease of the upper class clientele. Yeah. Now, the author's
note here that though even though there was you know,
this boom in Lithia water and the healing powers of lithium.
The authors know that there was almost no mention of
lithium in psychiatry papers of the time, so bottling lithia
(22:51):
waters became big business. But it took a serious dive
in the US when the US government got involved. So
the US Bureau of Chemistry, this was a precursor to
the FDA. They examined the waters on the market, the
lithio waters, and there was lithio waters coming from Lithium
springs and Georgia, but also from other places. And they
tested these waters out and they found that they contained
(23:12):
little to know lithium, and it was concluded that whatever
results people were experiencing were mainly due to just drinking water.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Oh that's interesting and.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Yeah, which kind of goes back to what we were
talking about earlier, like earlier in the last episode, like
even if the treatment itself is doing nothing else, then
perhaps you're drinking more water than usual, you're drinking less
beer or what have you.
Speaker 3 (23:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Yeah, So when this happened, when the US Bureau of
Chemistry chimed in, well lithium proponents, they pivoted more to
the use of lithium tablets, which the authors here point
out could be properly measured, you know, you could be
a little more certain about how much lithium you're giving people.
But then there was kind of like a power creep
with the lithium tablets. The concentrations increased and the dangers
(23:58):
of lithium toxicity became more appair, all while the actual
therapeutic properties of lithium consumption seemed just unverifiable. So therapeutic
use of lithium eventually just went out of fashion. I
found a couple of the original scathing reviews of lithio
water from the time period collected in The Checkered History
of Lithium and Medicine by Stroe, Bush and Jefferson in
(24:19):
nineteen eighties Pharmacy and History, Volume twenty two, number two.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Let's hear these reviews.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Oh yeah, they're good, so the US Bureau of Chemistry
said at the time, in a review by Charles Harrington, MD. Quote,
this water claims to be a cure for almost all
ills to which flesh is air, and to contain over
fourteen grains of lithium salts per gallon. It proves to
be an exceedingly hard water, practically free from organic matter,
(24:47):
absolutely free from lithia, but rich and undesirable lime salts.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Priceless.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Yeah, it really brings the hammer down. And then there's
another case. The Supreme Court of the District of Columbia
had this to say concerning waters from Buffalo Lithia Springs,
Virginia at the time. Quote, for a person to obtain
a therapeutic dose of lithium by drinking Buffalo lithia water,
he would have to drink from one hundred and fifty
thousand to two hundred and twenty five thousand gallons of
(25:17):
water per day. It was further testified without contradiction that
Potomac River water contains five times as much lithium per
gallon as the water in controversy.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
Oh amazing. So like, the one thing you can be
sure about with lithium water is that it doesn't really
have any lithium.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Yeah. Again, these were these were the findings at the time.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Now, it's interesting that you mentioned lithium went out of
fashion as a health treatment or a mood treatment, because
while I'm certainly not on the cutting edge of a psychopharmacology,
I do believe that lithium has been used in the
modern era as a psychiatric treeatment, hasn't it.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
Yeah, Yeah, And that's the thing that I guess can
for us, like retroactively, can be kind of confusing about
all this because because lithium does become an important treatment,
specifically for bipolar disorder, this wasn't discovered until nineteen forty nine.
That's when American psychiatrist John Kade discovered that it could
be used as a mood stabilizer for bipolar disorder, as
(26:23):
opposed to resorting to lobotomy or electroconvulsive therapy, which were
kind of the standards of the day. So that was
nineteen forty nine. The treatment became more prominent and more
covered by I believe nineteen fifty two, and it was
approved by the FDA in the nineteen seventies. And I've
read that it remains an effective treatment, though the authors
(26:46):
of this particular paper about the history of lithium as
a treatment, they point out that it still remains in
some circles somewhat controversial due to toxicity and side effects.
So you know, it's I guess with all say case
with a lot of medications, you know, it's like there's
it has a definite usage, but you also have to
be aware of the potential side effects to it, and
(27:08):
some discussion still remains. Yeah, So to come back to
wondering if lithio water springs could have offered relief to
individual suffering from specific neurological maladies, I don't know. Again,
you know, no expert on any of this, but it
seems iffy based on what we've looked at, mainly because
of concentration issues with the water itself and the risk
(27:31):
of toxicity and side effects if higher quantities were obtained
from the water, which it doesn't seem like is necessarily
the case with any of these naturally occurring lithia spring waters.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
I mean, it seems like from what you've been talking
about that carefully managing dosage of lithium is one of
the crucial factors in modern prescriptions, and so like, if
you're just gulping down water that has some questionable amount
of lithium content, that seems like you're either maybe not
getting enough for it to make much of a difference,
or you risk getting too much and that is highly toxic.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
Yeah, And I just I don't think the concentrations in
just out there in the natural occurring spring waters would
be high enough to even really register for you. Now
you can still buy and drink lithia waters from different springs,
(28:27):
though it's not held up as I think the miracle
cure at once was, though I don't know. It kind
of depends on branding and fads. I guess from what
I can tell, it contains lithium by the micrograms, though,
rather than the milligrams which would be involved in therapeutic doses.
So I think you'd find yourself, even with definite lithio
water that you might purchase, you'd still have to drink
(28:49):
those gallons of it, those hundreds of thousands of gallons
of it per day to get the levels that would
reach anything like a therapeutic dosage. Now on this count
of concerned lithia springwater. Thanks to our listener Sean for
writing in on this concerning a particular Irish well, the
well at glenn Nannialt. I've read that this area is
(29:11):
also called Valley of the Mad and may date back
to the twelfth century. I don't know what the lithium
levels are this well. I can't find any data on that,
but I don't know based on what we've looked at.
I think it's a safe bet that it did not
contain or does not contain therapeutic amounts of lithium, and
that the connection here is just a coincidence. And also
(29:32):
worth noting that lithium springs in North America likewise tend
to predate any modern medical or scientific understanding, and we're
utilized by indigenous peoples long before the arrival of westerners.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Well that was very interesting digression. What else have you
got for me?
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Oh? Well, we should also talk about potentially radioactive spring waters.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Nothing better for your gout than radioactive spring waters.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
Yeah, specifically radium springs, So tarifer. We've talked about radium
on the show before, but radium is a highly radioactive
alkaline earth metal discovered in eighteen ninety eight by Pierre
and Marie Curie. They discovered it by noting the radioactivity
in pitch blend radioactive uranium rich mineral relative to the
uranium it actually contains. They refined several tons of the
(30:18):
stuff of residues down to zero point one grams of
pure radium by nineteen oh two, and the isolated radium
in nineteen ten. Now, radium is important historically, you know,
tying into the work of the cures here, but its
commercial uses have long been very limited. So formerly it
was used in the creation of radio luminescent devices, and
(30:41):
it was also formally used in the medical treatment of cancer,
but has largely been replaced by stronger and less costly
artificial radioisotopes. One particular example of the radioluminescent topic here
there was a luminous paint known as Undark, created by
the United States Radium Corporation, noted for its connection to
(31:02):
the so called radium girls factory workers who contracted radiation
poisoning from painting with the stuff.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Yes, and that is a ghastly story if you want
to go read more about it. The luminescent radium paints
were used to like maybe illuminate the watch hands on,
you know, the dials on little clocks and watches and stuff,
for other glow in the dark purposes. And it was
glowing because the phosphorescent elements in the paint were being
(31:29):
bombarded by radiation from the radium content. So yeah, obviously
that was not good for humans.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
Yeah, but at the time this was we have to
put things in context. In the early twentieth century, there
was a great deal of radium fever going on, and
there was also not much in the way of regulation
of the stuff, so there were more than a few
medical quacks out there, you know, jumping in to make
some money off of the radium craze. So you saw
(31:59):
products like ratathor salts for supposed medicinal use, or the
radium or revigator. This would it was a radium lined
water vessel for your drinking water. But then on the
same count you also saw various products that either couldn't
(32:19):
or just didn't actually put radium into the product, but
really wanted a slice of the pie, so they included
radium in the brand name, such as Radium Brand Creamery butter.
This is an actual nineteen thirties product. I included the
label here for you, Joe, with this beautiful image of
these cattle drinking from some sort of a pond or
(32:43):
perhaps naturally occurring spring. The sun is rising or setting
in the background, and it says Radium Brand Creamery Butter.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Now, can I hope that this butter had just as
much radium content as the bottled lithium water actually had
lithium content means.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
None, right right? Yeah? This apparently had no actual radium
in it, But it was just getting in on the excitement,
like radium equals health and therefore, you know, there was
nobody to say you couldn't shouldn't do this. And there
are numerous examples of this sort of marketing, including the
non radioactive radium neutex condoms of the day.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
Oh but again not actually made with radium, right.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
And there are other examples of actually radioactive quack products
from the twentieth century, including the German door mud radioactive
toothpaste that was made using thorium. This was an actual
product and you can see some alarming looking like you know,
poster promotional art for this product as well. Now, all
of these quackery uses of radium are bad ideas because
(33:49):
it has no beneficial role in the human body. It's radioactive,
it's toxic. You don't need to be consuming radium.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
Salts, right, There's not like a hidden upside.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Right. But again, given the enthusiasm for radium during the
first half of the twentieth century, it should also come
as no surprise that people were also game to bathe
in the stuff. So the big one here is not
in Georgia. It is in what is now the Czech
Republic Radium Palace, which opened in nineteen twelve. It replaced
a smaller spa on the property and cashed in hard
(34:22):
on radium enthusiasm. Alice Obscure refers to the palace as
the birthplace of radio balneology. It ignited a fad in
spas around the world, anywhere where they were already naturally
occurring springs. If you found that there was any kind
of radium content to the waters, well, lo and behold,
you have a new way to market your spa new
(34:44):
way to market your spring water. Radium Palace and its
waters fell out of fashion after the Second World War,
but the hotel was apparently refurbished in the nineteen nineties
and it's rather stunning looking building, and it still offers
radium based treatments, though they're apparently limited by a contemporary
maximum permitted levels of radiation doses. But on the same level,
(35:05):
this looks like a very attractive resort, so we kind
of have to take It's kind of like going back
to their discussion of bath, like, is it you know,
the communal factors, the placebo factors of everything, the full scenario,
So I don't know, But coming back to our home
State of Georgia. Georgia also got in on the action
with radium springs radium. This is still called Radium Springs Georgia.
(35:30):
The spa here was already a retreat destination in the
early twentieth century, offering gambling and naturally occurring hot spring waters.
So you had a lot of folks who had come
down from the colder northern states during the winter and
they'd enjoy like the pleasant temperatures of just southern Georgia
during the winter, but also these hot springs. It was
(35:50):
known as Blue Springs at the time, but then in
nineteen twenty five they discovered radium in the water and
they rebranded thus radium Springs. And you can still visit it.
I actually looked it up and I was thinking, well,
maybe I could go down there, but then a rows
it was like a four hour drive one way, and
so maybe maybe it wouldn't fit into the work week
all that well, But you can still visit the grounds
(36:12):
here and it looks looks rather beautiful. So the supposed
health benefits of radium spring soaking of radium spring spa water,
I think in general is pretty dubious, though I suppose
it's conceivably safe if one is still below the maximal
permissible level of exposure. But yeah, otherwise I don't suppose
you'd really get much out of the experience, again, other
(36:35):
than just the set and setting of the whole thing.
It's worth noting that, of course, there are multiple springs
at Ramsar in Iran containing radium and thorium, and this
area is known as the most naturally radioactive place on Earth.
The springs here are also used as spas, and I
think we again have to put them in a larger
(36:57):
historic context. People have been coming here for a very
long time and continue to come to to Remsar in
order to enjoy these spring waters. So yeah, they're these
are these are places that were special and important again
before modern science came along to determine exactly what was
going on in the contents of the water. I'd be
(37:19):
very interested to hear from anyone out there who's had
experiences in a in a radium spring what you thought
of it, what what the sort of sell on it was,
what the grounds were like. I think it's it's fascinating.
I've not had the experience myself.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
Yes, same here, but it's interesting how this has just
kind of like opened up a door into this world
of all the strange, little quirky local thermal springs all
all over the world. So it makes me think we're
maybe going to get some really good listener mail about
this series.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Oh yeah, I want to.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
Hear about your your strange local thermal springs and spas
and what what's the backstory? What goes on there?
Speaker 1 (38:00):
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, because a lot of them have some
very rich traditions behind them, perhaps some quirky history and places,
and some alleged healing properties. So yeah, we've already heard
from at least a few listeners, so certainly keep it coming.
We'd love to dive into these over the next several
listener mail episodes. All right, Well, on that note, we're
(38:22):
going to go and close it out for today, but
we'd love to hear from everyone out there, so you know,
definitely write in just a reminder that Stuff to Blow
Your Mind publishes its core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays
we have a short form artifactor Monster Fact episode and
Wednesdays on Mondays we do the listener mail, and on
Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk
about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for
the future, or just to say hello, you can email
us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. We're going
into the vault. Going down to the vault. This is
part four of our series called The Washing of the Waters.
This episode originally published on March twenty third, twenty twenty three,
and I think it closes out this series, so we
hope you enjoy.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with the
fourth and final part of our series on the Healing Waters,
the belief held by many throughout history that you could
cure your illnesses and improve your health by bathing or
immersing yourself in water, often water with special properties, maybe
(01:03):
water of a certain temperature like hot baths or cold baths,
or water from a special source such as a particular
warm mineral spring. Now. In previous episodes, as a brief refresher,
we talked about the prehistoric emergence of bathing culture and
the ancient religious associations between bathing and spiritual purity in
(01:26):
the realm of healing. We talked about ancient Greek and
Roman theories of medicine, such as humoral theory, which sometimes
had the consequence of recommending bathing as a cure for
all sorts of health problems, and we also talked about
the importance of baths and spas in the culture and
civic infrastructure of the Roman Empire. We discussed some interesting
(01:47):
and strange examples of spas with alleged healing powers that
contain living organisms such as blood worms or fish, that
are themselves thought to in some way be a mechanism
of healing. And in the episode just previous to this one,
we discussed and I thought fascinating medical history paper from
a few decades back analyzing records of treatment that made
(02:10):
use of the thermal waters of Bath, England, and this
paper argued that while yeah, most of the conditions people
thought could be cured by bathing in hot springs throughout
history were probably just benefiting from the placebo effect, there
is pretty decent evidence for thinking that the immersion treatments
at Bath were genuinely directly effective at curing paralysis caused
(02:33):
by chronic lead poisoning. Because according to the author, sitting
up to your neck in warm water increases the rate
in which your body purges lead content through urine. Anyway,
after all that, we're back today to finish off this
series with a few more interesting tidbits. Now, one of
the things I did want to briefly talk about is
(02:53):
that a lot of the mineral springs with alleged healing
powers that we've mentioned so far have been in places
that were formerly part of the Roman Empire. And I
think this should not be surprising, given the importance of
bathing in Roman culture in general, but especially in the
Greek and Roman theories of medicine we discussed in the
(03:14):
previous parts of the series, and in fact you can
still see the lingering effects of this. There are alleged
healing spas all throughout Europe that go way way back
that can be traced back to Roman times. But I
don't think we should assume that the association of some
forms of bathing with healing is just like an odd
(03:34):
unique belief contingent on some amount of Roman cultural heritage,
because I think it seems that people in many places
around the world, at various times, have come to think
that they can be healed by bathing, by bathing in
general or through the specific waters of some particular mineral spring.
(03:55):
And so you can find examples of this from around
the world. There was one that I ended up doing
kind of a deep dive on. I was reading about
the Kittigata Hot Springs of Uganda. So the Kittigata Hot
Springs are They're a system of geothermal springs in southwest Uganda.
I've seen the name Kittygata translated as both warm water
(04:16):
and as warm place or good place. And there is
a town of the same name located about two kilometers
northwest of the springs. And these waters are said to
collect in two side by side pools, and they are
believed by many to have healing properties, so much so
that they are or at least they were, as of
(04:38):
the sources I was reading, which were some Uganda newspaper
articles from roughly ten years ago or so. At that time,
they were being visited by hundreds of people every day,
both locals and tourists, tourists from within Uganda and tourists internationally.
And I was reading about the springs in a series
of articles from a Ugandan English language newspaper called new Vision,
(05:02):
which is based out of Kampala. So one of the
articles is called the Healing Hot Springs. It was published
in February twenty fourteen by Chris Mugasha. And in this
article the author actually describes a visit he had to
the springs and describes some basic facts about them and
sort of how they're used by the people. So Rabbi
(05:22):
attached them pictures of the Kiddy Gotta Springs. You can
see that they are surrounded by some very interesting rock formations.
I don't know exactly what sort of geology forms the
rocks like this, but you can see that all around
the pools there are these strange, beautiful, interesting kind of
like crags poking up in all directions.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, the sense of the rocks being burst
out by swelling from beneath.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Yeah. So, according to Mugasha's article here, the springs are
divided into a section that's used by men, and then
a section used by women and children. And then also
there are some people who don't actually want to stay
and bathe in person with everybody else. And he says
they bring jerry cans and fill them up with hot
spring water to carry back home, and the thermal pools
(06:11):
also vary by temperature. There's one area that apparently has
comfortably warm water, while the other has water that the
author describes as hot enough to prepare porridge or cook
an egg.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Yeah, this is a feature of various hot springs that
I was reading about, just because as the hot spring
doesn't mean you can or should get into it. There's
some very dangerous hot springs out there in the world,
and you should definitely obey any signage or rules and
regulations surrounding them. But then there are also plenty of
complexes where if you know the right place to go
(06:45):
in a spring complex, then you'll be all right because
that's where the water will be warm and not hot
enough to cook eggs.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Right, And it seemed from what I was reading that
the area with water hot enough to cook an egg
may still be used for some things, but I doubt
people are like getting in in that water and hanging
out there for a long time, because you don't want
to be the egg.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Though this is in this topic, this is not something
I researched, but this might be something we might have
to put a pin in to come back to in
discussing like the history of cooking, you know, because we've
talked about the importance of natural springs, both hot and cold,
to ancient peoples. I wonder how this factors or doesn't
factor into the history of boiling as a cooking method.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
I have no idea, but that is an interesting question. Yeah,
maybe before we had fire, did anybody ever try to
like boil their food in a hot spring? I don't
know what evidence of that there would be left over.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
If they did. Yeah, that would be the thing, right anyway.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
So the author here says that people visit the springs
for multiple reasons. So some people it's it seems to
be just recreational. People come for pleasure and relaxation and
the hot waters. Maybe they come after work to chill out,
or they come to admire the area's natural beauty. But
he says that the majority of people there are looking
for healing of some kind. And an earlier article in
(08:06):
the same newspaper I read in New Vision. This article
was by Ali Wasswa from August twenty thirteen, mentions people
coming to the springs hoping for cures to a wide
range of health issues, both minor and severe. So this
includes everything from acne to cancer and While many people
claim to have experienced improvements after bathing in the water,
(08:29):
Wasswa's article cites some doubts about the efficacy of these
cures from a researcher named Moses Kakaya who was affiliated
with an organization called Save for Health Uganda that appears
to be a Ugandan public health Inngo, and the article
says that this team investigated the springs and said they
found the waters had no special healing properties. Mugasha's article
(08:53):
mentions that to the extent the waters do have any
healing properties, if they do, those could possibly be based
in specific mineral contents of the water. We've discussed some
possibilities of those kinds with other springs, but also the
claims of healing could simply be from the heat of
the water, feeling good, alleviating pain and swollen joints and
(09:14):
things like that, or just from easing stress, you know,
helping people relax and other quote psychotherapeutic effects. Now, this
article and another article also by Mugasha from the month
before mention threats to the springs, which is something I
think we haven't really thought about that much yet, but
that hot springs are not necessarily an eternal phenomenon or
(09:39):
even a semi eternal phenomenon, because even though they are
heated by the rocks from deep down below they you know,
they still are subject to hydrodynamic effects and so like
changes of what's going on where water drains, where water
goes can affect how a hot spring works. And so
these two articles mention some threat to the springs. So
(10:01):
the article from a month before by the same author
reports complaints from locals that construction from a nearby highway
has had negative effects on the springs. Basically, it seems
that they're claiming water from a nearby wetland system was
diverted because of roadwork and this has led to flooding
of the spring. And of course flooding of the spring
(10:24):
is like mixing water from other sources, which causes the
water to become tepid.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Nobody wants to travel to a tepid spring.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Yeah, And the later article by Mugasha also mentions changes
in weather patterns due to climate change possibly having an
effect because changing rain patterns mean that the increased flooding
of the nearby river also means that it runs over
into the spring, and this results. I think if I'm
(10:52):
understanding right once again with the river water coming into
the spring water and you know, kind of like diluting it.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Yeah, absolutely to your point of these springs like those
are environmental conditions and they can be altered either intentionally
or accidentally exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
And so this article describes people who were local people
who were trying to protect the spring having to like
stack up essentially sort of sandbags, like bags of gravel
to try to block the flow, the inflow of water
from other sources into the spring.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Now I was trying to find a scientific paper directly
testing the alleged healing properties of this spring in particular
because again, you know, one of the articles mentions an
investigation by that Ugandan public Health NGO about its medical properties.
I didn't come across anything, so I can't comment with
any confidence about whether these springs would have any health
(11:47):
effects other than placebo. But especially since that paper we
read in the last episode arguing that that SPA therapy
could have actual effects on chronic lead poisoning in particular,
and again that was the art, was that it worked
by increasing the rate at which lad as purge from
the body through urine. I wonder, you know, I wonder
if there are other conditions where people might be getting
(12:10):
some health improvements through a surprising mechanism other than just maybe, say,
you know, the very real effects of relaxing in nice
warm water.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Yeah, you always have to at least keep the door
open to such a possibility, even if in many cases
it seems perhaps unlikely based on what we understand currently. Now,
as long as we're speaking about, you know, other international
examples of healing waters, I felt like we should at
least acknowledge that the River Ganges in India and Bangladesh
(12:41):
has long been held as a traditional place of healing
via immersion. Again, not a natural you know, spring, hot
spring and could spring, et cetera, but a great river.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Yeah. This is actually a subtopic that I became very
interested in when we first started looking at the series.
But then I got kind of overwhelmed, and I like, oh,
it seems like the Ganges would have to be an
entire series on its own.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
Yeah. Absolutely, there's just so much to it. You've got
glacier snow and permafrost melt. You've got discussions of supposedly
beneficial bacteriophages, antibiotic resistant bacteria that are not beneficial. Then
you have to deal with topics such as pollution as
well as all of this on top of a rich
(13:26):
tradition of religious significance. So yeah, I think it's something
we'd have to come back to and cover in more
depth in the future. But at the same time, we
didn't want to give the impression that we were just
overlooking it right now. Another example of spring and spa
culture I wanted to bring up, just briefly, is, of
course Japan. Japan has a very rich tradition of spas
(13:48):
and thermal springs, and I believe we previously alluded to
the Japanese macaques who famously immersed themselves in hot springs
and also do so communally. So that's a great example
non human primates engaging in this very activity that humans
have enjoyed for so long. So I've read that they're
somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty five thousand hot spring
(14:10):
sources or on sen throughout Japan. I got an email
recently about a tour of hot springs in Japan eighteen
days long. Looked amazing, but just you know, it basically
shows that, yeah, you can travel to Japan and largely
just do hot springs and it'll be enough to fill
eighteen days worth of travel. Now, one in particular that
(14:33):
I thought was pretty interesting, and I have to stress
this is not actually an example of a spring system
where you can do much or really any bathing. But
it's called Chinoki Jigoku, and it's in Bepou, Japan. And
here you'll find the aid Hells of Bepu. I think
(14:53):
I've sometimes seen the count of seven, but I believe
eight is the right count. There's and these are translated,
of course from the Japanese. There's sea hell, white pond hell,
devil mountain hell, mountain Hell, alligator hell, cooking pot hell,
which this is actually the case cooking pod hell. These
are all thermal springs and is the and as the
name implies, many of them are really hot. Cooking pot
(15:15):
hell is where you can actually cook food, and there
there's a long standing tradition of cooking food in this
particular thermal spring. There's tornado Hell, and then there is
blood pond hell or bloody hell. Pond.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
Is it red?
Speaker 1 (15:28):
It is very red. Yeah, you can look up pictures
of this. It's it's it's too hot to get into.
It's it's basically hot enough to cook food in itself.
It has a deep red color that I believe is
due to both like clay content and iron oxide.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
I would have assumed red bacteria.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
All of these these hells, all these ponds, these are
tourist destinations. You can go and visit them, and I
think they have if I'm understanding correctly from the information
I was looking at, they have smaller pools for like
soaking your feet in as a visitor. So even though
you can't stick your feet directly into many of these hells,
and I think Alligator hell As actually has alligators in it,
(16:08):
and you don't want to stick your feet in there either,
But at any rate, they do have some smaller pools
that I guess are fed or partially fed by the
actual spring waters that you can get your feet wet in.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
I had no idea that were alligators in Japan.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
They might be important. I'm not sure what their status is.
Oh interesting, they're definitely alligators here, no matter where they
came from. I don't care.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Where your alligators come from. I just want there to
be alligators. They've got to be alligators in Alligator hell.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Yes, I believe they come through on that front. All right, well,
let's get back into the healing waters though away from
the alligator waters and the egg boiling waters. So we've
(16:58):
already talked a bit in these episodes of about traditional
healing waters potentially having something specific in them, something in
the contents of the waters that enable healing in human bathers.
And in some cases these springs end up having something
in them that in some cases where a particular element
(17:20):
in the water is also utilized in modern medical treatments
one way or the other. So it's tempting to wonder, well,
if these springs maybe offer the same benefits for those
who simply immerse themselves in the water or drink of
the waters.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Okay, so not that this would happen, but for example,
it would be like, you know, a seedaminifen is the
is the active ingredient in thaileanol, And then maybe we discover, oh,
there is a spring that naturally has a seedamenifen content
in it, and you wonder if we're people like getting
their pretailenol thailanol from this spring.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Well, that would that would be a bad idea for
number obvious reasons there, thinking about you know, controlled dosages
of something in a general medication versus how much are
you getting out of the water, how much you can
if you're drinking it or potentially absorbing it through your skin.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
Yes, calibration of dosage would would seem to be a
big problem with this, So.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
So definitely something to keep in mind as we go
into a couple of specific examples, and I think they're
both pretty fun specific examples too, in that they both
have connections to our home state of Georgia. Here in
the United States, we don't often get to cover things
that are that are present in Georgia or Georgia history.
So we're going to start with lithia water. This is
(18:43):
mineral water marked by the presence of lithium salts. Now,
to be clear, most of what we're talking about with
lithia water concerns its consumption, though I have read that
sweet Water Park Hotel this is a luxury resort which
operated in Lithiu's Rings, Georgia during the heyday of lithium
water tourism. In Georgia's Douglas County also offered lithia vapor bats,
(19:08):
which we're said to be very popular. I included an
old illustration of what this I guess may have consisted
of for you here, Joe.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Okay, so what we're looking at here up here to
be wooden boxes in which men are situated with their
heads poking out of a hole in a wooden plank,
so it's like they're in a pillory, but well, I
guess without the wrists poking out, so it's just the
head poking out of the pillory. And then there is
steam shooting out of the edges of the box, so
you can you can tell it must be quite warm
(19:38):
and moist on the inside.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Yes, now none of this is going on today, but
I don't know. Do you ever make it up to
Sweetwater Creek State Park, Joe, this is the same area.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a great place.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Yeah, beautiful, beautiful place. But back in the day, back
at the like the the end of the eighteen hundreds
beginning of the nineteen hundreds, this was a very popular
destination for well to do folks such as the Vanderbilts
such as Mark Twain. This particular Sweetwater Park Hotel was
again luxury resort. People came from all over to partake
(20:15):
of the of the healing powers of Lithia waters. The
hotel burned down in nineteen twelve, so you know it's
not even there as a historical location anymore.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
This is funny that you mentioned Mark Twain, because he
also came up in a in a research tangent that
I ended up not including. But he he wrote a
piece about a place like a spa. He went to
somewhere in Europe. I think it was in France, and
it's called I don't even know how to pronounce the
name of this place. The name it was called ai X.
Do you know how you say that?
Speaker 1 (20:45):
I do not.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Let's call it I. He went to I in I
think it's France, and he wrote a piece about it
called I Paradise of the Rheumattics. So I guess Twain
was into veryvarious kinds of like hot wet healing.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Yeah. Well, and he was very well traveled for the day.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
So I was reading a little bit more about this
whole fad around lithio waters, and I was reading a
paper titled Lithium Treatment in Clinical Medicine History, Current Status
in Future Use, published in the Journal of Cell Science
and Therapy in twenty seventeen by Duval and Galachio. And
this was interesting point out that lithia water became a
(21:28):
health fad around eighteen fifty and was especially big and
again the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds. It
was thought to treat gout, anxiety, various nervous conditions, and
a whole slew of other ailments. So a similar situation
that we found, you know, discussing any of these healing waters.
What does it treat? Well? What you got going on? Right?
Speaker 2 (21:52):
A lot of things. So it's interesting they mentioned gout
because that did come up in the paper about Bath,
specifically as one of the lead poisoning associated conditions that
the physicians at Bath thought could be cured by long
periods of immersion. But another thing about gout at Bath
was one of the purposes of like recording all this
(22:16):
data at the charity hospital there to say, you know,
we really can prove that these waters are providing a benefit,
was to try to attract rich patients who had gout.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
Well. It is often referred to as the disease of kings, right, yeah,
disease of the upper class clientele. Yeah. Now, the author's
note here that though even though there was you know,
this boom in Lithia water and the healing powers of lithium.
The authors know that there was almost no mention of
lithium in psychiatry papers of the time, so bottling lithia
(22:51):
waters became big business. But it took a serious dive
in the US when the US government got involved. So
the US Bureau of Chemistry, this was a precursor to
the FDA. They examined the waters on the market, the
lithio waters, and there was lithio waters coming from Lithium
springs and Georgia, but also from other places. And they
tested these waters out and they found that they contained
(23:12):
little to know lithium, and it was concluded that whatever
results people were experiencing were mainly due to just drinking water.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Oh that's interesting and.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Yeah, which kind of goes back to what we were
talking about earlier, like earlier in the last episode, like
even if the treatment itself is doing nothing else, then
perhaps you're drinking more water than usual, you're drinking less
beer or what have you.
Speaker 3 (23:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Yeah, So when this happened, when the US Bureau of
Chemistry chimed in, well lithium proponents, they pivoted more to
the use of lithium tablets, which the authors here point
out could be properly measured, you know, you could be
a little more certain about how much lithium you're giving people.
But then there was kind of like a power creep
with the lithium tablets. The concentrations increased and the dangers
(23:58):
of lithium toxicity became more appair, all while the actual
therapeutic properties of lithium consumption seemed just unverifiable. So therapeutic
use of lithium eventually just went out of fashion. I
found a couple of the original scathing reviews of lithio
water from the time period collected in The Checkered History
of Lithium and Medicine by Stroe, Bush and Jefferson in
(24:19):
nineteen eighties Pharmacy and History, Volume twenty two, number two.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Let's hear these reviews.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Oh yeah, they're good, so the US Bureau of Chemistry
said at the time, in a review by Charles Harrington, MD. Quote,
this water claims to be a cure for almost all
ills to which flesh is air, and to contain over
fourteen grains of lithium salts per gallon. It proves to
be an exceedingly hard water, practically free from organic matter,
(24:47):
absolutely free from lithia, but rich and undesirable lime salts.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Priceless.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Yeah, it really brings the hammer down. And then there's
another case. The Supreme Court of the District of Columbia
had this to say concerning waters from Buffalo Lithia Springs,
Virginia at the time. Quote, for a person to obtain
a therapeutic dose of lithium by drinking Buffalo lithia water,
he would have to drink from one hundred and fifty
thousand to two hundred and twenty five thousand gallons of
(25:17):
water per day. It was further testified without contradiction that
Potomac River water contains five times as much lithium per
gallon as the water in controversy.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
Oh amazing. So like, the one thing you can be
sure about with lithium water is that it doesn't really
have any lithium.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Yeah. Again, these were these were the findings at the time.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Now, it's interesting that you mentioned lithium went out of
fashion as a health treatment or a mood treatment, because
while I'm certainly not on the cutting edge of a psychopharmacology,
I do believe that lithium has been used in the
modern era as a psychiatric treeatment, hasn't it.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
Yeah, Yeah, And that's the thing that I guess can
for us, like retroactively, can be kind of confusing about
all this because because lithium does become an important treatment,
specifically for bipolar disorder, this wasn't discovered until nineteen forty nine.
That's when American psychiatrist John Kade discovered that it could
be used as a mood stabilizer for bipolar disorder, as
(26:23):
opposed to resorting to lobotomy or electroconvulsive therapy, which were
kind of the standards of the day. So that was
nineteen forty nine. The treatment became more prominent and more
covered by I believe nineteen fifty two, and it was
approved by the FDA in the nineteen seventies. And I've
read that it remains an effective treatment, though the authors
(26:46):
of this particular paper about the history of lithium as
a treatment, they point out that it still remains in
some circles somewhat controversial due to toxicity and side effects.
So you know, it's I guess with all say case
with a lot of medications, you know, it's like there's
it has a definite usage, but you also have to
be aware of the potential side effects to it, and
(27:08):
some discussion still remains. Yeah, So to come back to
wondering if lithio water springs could have offered relief to
individual suffering from specific neurological maladies, I don't know. Again,
you know, no expert on any of this, but it
seems iffy based on what we've looked at, mainly because
of concentration issues with the water itself and the risk
(27:31):
of toxicity and side effects if higher quantities were obtained
from the water, which it doesn't seem like is necessarily
the case with any of these naturally occurring lithia spring waters.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
I mean, it seems like from what you've been talking
about that carefully managing dosage of lithium is one of
the crucial factors in modern prescriptions, and so like, if
you're just gulping down water that has some questionable amount
of lithium content, that seems like you're either maybe not
getting enough for it to make much of a difference,
or you risk getting too much and that is highly toxic.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
Yeah, And I just I don't think the concentrations in
just out there in the natural occurring spring waters would
be high enough to even really register for you. Now
you can still buy and drink lithia waters from different springs,
(28:27):
though it's not held up as I think the miracle
cure at once was, though I don't know. It kind
of depends on branding and fads. I guess from what
I can tell, it contains lithium by the micrograms, though,
rather than the milligrams which would be involved in therapeutic doses.
So I think you'd find yourself, even with definite lithio
water that you might purchase, you'd still have to drink
(28:49):
those gallons of it, those hundreds of thousands of gallons
of it per day to get the levels that would
reach anything like a therapeutic dosage. Now on this count
of concerned lithia springwater. Thanks to our listener Sean for
writing in on this concerning a particular Irish well, the
well at glenn Nannialt. I've read that this area is
(29:11):
also called Valley of the Mad and may date back
to the twelfth century. I don't know what the lithium
levels are this well. I can't find any data on that,
but I don't know based on what we've looked at.
I think it's a safe bet that it did not
contain or does not contain therapeutic amounts of lithium, and
that the connection here is just a coincidence. And also
(29:32):
worth noting that lithium springs in North America likewise tend
to predate any modern medical or scientific understanding, and we're
utilized by indigenous peoples long before the arrival of westerners.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Well that was very interesting digression. What else have you
got for me?
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Oh? Well, we should also talk about potentially radioactive spring waters.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Nothing better for your gout than radioactive spring waters.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
Yeah, specifically radium springs, So tarifer. We've talked about radium
on the show before, but radium is a highly radioactive
alkaline earth metal discovered in eighteen ninety eight by Pierre
and Marie Curie. They discovered it by noting the radioactivity
in pitch blend radioactive uranium rich mineral relative to the
uranium it actually contains. They refined several tons of the
(30:18):
stuff of residues down to zero point one grams of
pure radium by nineteen oh two, and the isolated radium
in nineteen ten. Now, radium is important historically, you know,
tying into the work of the cures here, but its
commercial uses have long been very limited. So formerly it
was used in the creation of radio luminescent devices, and
(30:41):
it was also formally used in the medical treatment of cancer,
but has largely been replaced by stronger and less costly
artificial radioisotopes. One particular example of the radioluminescent topic here
there was a luminous paint known as Undark, created by
the United States Radium Corporation, noted for its connection to
(31:02):
the so called radium girls factory workers who contracted radiation
poisoning from painting with the stuff.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Yes, and that is a ghastly story if you want
to go read more about it. The luminescent radium paints
were used to like maybe illuminate the watch hands on,
you know, the dials on little clocks and watches and stuff,
for other glow in the dark purposes. And it was
glowing because the phosphorescent elements in the paint were being
(31:29):
bombarded by radiation from the radium content. So yeah, obviously
that was not good for humans.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
Yeah, but at the time this was we have to
put things in context. In the early twentieth century, there
was a great deal of radium fever going on, and
there was also not much in the way of regulation
of the stuff, so there were more than a few
medical quacks out there, you know, jumping in to make
some money off of the radium craze. So you saw
(31:59):
products like ratathor salts for supposed medicinal use, or the
radium or revigator. This would it was a radium lined
water vessel for your drinking water. But then on the
same count you also saw various products that either couldn't
(32:19):
or just didn't actually put radium into the product, but
really wanted a slice of the pie, so they included
radium in the brand name, such as Radium Brand Creamery butter.
This is an actual nineteen thirties product. I included the
label here for you, Joe, with this beautiful image of
these cattle drinking from some sort of a pond or
(32:43):
perhaps naturally occurring spring. The sun is rising or setting
in the background, and it says Radium Brand Creamery Butter.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Now, can I hope that this butter had just as
much radium content as the bottled lithium water actually had
lithium content means.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
None, right right? Yeah? This apparently had no actual radium
in it, But it was just getting in on the excitement,
like radium equals health and therefore, you know, there was
nobody to say you couldn't shouldn't do this. And there
are numerous examples of this sort of marketing, including the
non radioactive radium neutex condoms of the day.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
Oh but again not actually made with radium, right.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
And there are other examples of actually radioactive quack products
from the twentieth century, including the German door mud radioactive
toothpaste that was made using thorium. This was an actual
product and you can see some alarming looking like you know,
poster promotional art for this product as well. Now, all
of these quackery uses of radium are bad ideas because
(33:49):
it has no beneficial role in the human body. It's radioactive,
it's toxic. You don't need to be consuming radium.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
Salts, right, There's not like a hidden upside.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Right. But again, given the enthusiasm for radium during the
first half of the twentieth century, it should also come
as no surprise that people were also game to bathe
in the stuff. So the big one here is not
in Georgia. It is in what is now the Czech
Republic Radium Palace, which opened in nineteen twelve. It replaced
a smaller spa on the property and cashed in hard
(34:22):
on radium enthusiasm. Alice Obscure refers to the palace as
the birthplace of radio balneology. It ignited a fad in
spas around the world, anywhere where they were already naturally
occurring springs. If you found that there was any kind
of radium content to the waters, well, lo and behold,
you have a new way to market your spa new
(34:44):
way to market your spring water. Radium Palace and its
waters fell out of fashion after the Second World War,
but the hotel was apparently refurbished in the nineteen nineties
and it's rather stunning looking building, and it still offers
radium based treatments, though they're apparently limited by a contemporary
maximum permitted levels of radiation doses. But on the same level,
(35:05):
this looks like a very attractive resort, so we kind
of have to take It's kind of like going back
to their discussion of bath, like, is it you know,
the communal factors, the placebo factors of everything, the full scenario,
So I don't know, But coming back to our home
State of Georgia. Georgia also got in on the action
with radium springs radium. This is still called Radium Springs Georgia.
(35:30):
The spa here was already a retreat destination in the
early twentieth century, offering gambling and naturally occurring hot spring waters.
So you had a lot of folks who had come
down from the colder northern states during the winter and
they'd enjoy like the pleasant temperatures of just southern Georgia
during the winter, but also these hot springs. It was
(35:50):
known as Blue Springs at the time, but then in
nineteen twenty five they discovered radium in the water and
they rebranded thus radium Springs. And you can still visit it.
I actually looked it up and I was thinking, well,
maybe I could go down there, but then a rows
it was like a four hour drive one way, and
so maybe maybe it wouldn't fit into the work week
all that well, But you can still visit the grounds
(36:12):
here and it looks looks rather beautiful. So the supposed
health benefits of radium spring soaking of radium spring spa water,
I think in general is pretty dubious, though I suppose
it's conceivably safe if one is still below the maximal
permissible level of exposure. But yeah, otherwise I don't suppose
you'd really get much out of the experience, again, other
(36:35):
than just the set and setting of the whole thing.
It's worth noting that, of course, there are multiple springs
at Ramsar in Iran containing radium and thorium, and this
area is known as the most naturally radioactive place on Earth.
The springs here are also used as spas, and I
think we again have to put them in a larger
(36:57):
historic context. People have been coming here for a very
long time and continue to come to to Remsar in
order to enjoy these spring waters. So yeah, they're these
are these are places that were special and important again
before modern science came along to determine exactly what was
going on in the contents of the water. I'd be
(37:19):
very interested to hear from anyone out there who's had
experiences in a in a radium spring what you thought
of it, what what the sort of sell on it was,
what the grounds were like. I think it's it's fascinating.
I've not had the experience myself.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
Yes, same here, but it's interesting how this has just
kind of like opened up a door into this world
of all the strange, little quirky local thermal springs all
all over the world. So it makes me think we're
maybe going to get some really good listener mail about
this series.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Oh yeah, I want to.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
Hear about your your strange local thermal springs and spas
and what what's the backstory? What goes on there?
Speaker 1 (38:00):
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, because a lot of them have some
very rich traditions behind them, perhaps some quirky history and places,
and some alleged healing properties. So yeah, we've already heard
from at least a few listeners, so certainly keep it coming.
We'd love to dive into these over the next several
listener mail episodes. All right, Well, on that note, we're
(38:22):
going to go and close it out for today, but
we'd love to hear from everyone out there, so you know,
definitely write in just a reminder that Stuff to Blow
Your Mind publishes its core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays
we have a short form artifactor Monster Fact episode and
Wednesdays on Mondays we do the listener mail, and on
Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk
about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for
the future, or just to say hello, you can email
us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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Joe McCormick
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