The development of the spa in seventeenth-century France.

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE SPA In the Anglo-Saxon world the enthusiasm of the twentieth-century Frenchman for imbibing his country's mineral waters is proverbial. It is surprising, therefore, to discover that the French contribution to the resuscitation of the spa in the era of the Renaissance was minimal. For most of the sixteenth century, the nation that has given mankind the waters of Vichy and Evian (to name but two) was largely unmoved by the fad for the hot-spring and the mineral bath that swept the Italian peninsula, crossed the Alps into the territory of the Holy Roman Empire, and penetrated even our own shores. It was not that France's future spas were undiscovered, for many had a Romano-Gallic provenance. It was rather that the therapeutic potential of mineral waters remained unrecognized by the Galenic medical establishment and hence by the large majority of the court, aristocracy, and urban elite who formed their clients. Significantly, when Andreas Baccius published the first general guide to the spas of Europe in 1571 he had little to say about France. Passing reference was made to several Roman foundations but only the virtues of Bourbon-Lancy were described in detail.1 Significantly, too, the only member of the French royal family who definitely did take the waters in the first three-quarters of the sixteenth century was united by marriage to the house of Navarre and patronized, as did her daughter later, the springs of Beam, not those of France.2 The situation first began to change in the 1 580s when a number of local physicians started to promote the waters adjacent to the towns in which they plied their profession. Their inspiration, it would seem, came largely (although not entirely) from a change of heart at court. Much of the impetus for the development of the spa north of the Alps was provided by Paracelsians, whose interest in metallic and arcane remedies drew them ineluctably to the mineral spring. Most Paracelsians, however, were Protestants or Erasmian eirenicists above the religious divides of the day and it was only in the reign of the politique Henri III (1574-89) that they surfaced at the Catholic Valois court and began to influence medical opinion close to the royal