Drinking Stinking Spa Waters in Early Modern Britain

Visitors to the Roman Baths Museum in Bath, UK spend most of their trip learning how Roman Britons swam, plunged, and sweated in thermal pools in order to maintain fitness and well-being. But the museum tour ends at the site of a very different kind of health craze: the Pump Room, where seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women and men gulped down gallons of spa water in the hopes of curing disease. In early modern Britain, visitors to spas such as Bath swam just like the Romans had, but the..