In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the Western world went through a period of preoccupation with wellness. People took up vegetarianism, nudism, spiritualism, and the consumption of patent medicines with whopping narcotic content. If Lydia Pinkham’s couldn’t cure your hiccups, there were spas and sanatoriums aplenty, many of them with a comic level of preoccupation with excretion. Turn of the century sanatorium life was satirized in T.C. Boyle’s 1994 novel The Road to Wellville, which was based on the cereal pioneer John Harvey Kellogg’s Battle Creek Sanitarium, as well as my old favorite The Magic Mountain. Unfortunately, it wasn’t all opium and sitz baths. Unscrupulous quacks preyed on rich hypochondriacs, convincing them that they were hysterical or consumptive or just plain constipated. In the worst-case scenario, “taking the cure” could be fatal.
In 1911 two British heiresses, both of them convinced that their digestive systems were on the verge of complete collapse, checked into a sanatorium in Washington State to undergo Dr. Linda Hazzard’s extraordinary “fasting cure”, which consisted of not eating anything. Predictably, one of the sisters died after a few months of treatment, and the other was forcibly removed, still convinced that her system was unable to process food. Dr. Hazzard’s gruesome career is outlined in the book Starvation Heights by true crime writer Gregg Olsen, on whom the irony of the fact that heiresses today are packed off to treatment centers in order to overcome voluntary starvation is not lost. Olsen’s book gives a bit of historical precedent for understanding the darker side of modern wellness culture: the marketing concept that people will pay and/or undergo almost anything to cure what ails them, physically or spiritually.
As I contemplated this phenomenon, a friend posted a fascinating article by Bitch magazine authors Joshunda Saunders and Diana Barnes-Brown about the emerging literary concept of “priv-lit”, meaning memoirs of personal improvement involving the consumption of significant resources. Now, before you read, allow me a massive disclaimer. The article comes down hard on both Oprah Winfrey and the recent book/movie Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert. I actually like Oprah, and have no right to criticize Eat, Pray, Love for two reasons:
1) I haven’t read it.
2) It would be grossly hypocritical of me to bash anyone for writing about the happiness and fulfillment of travel.
That said, the Bitch Magazine article makes timely and relevant points about the culture of luxury self-actualization. Last week, I defended people’s right to spend their disposable income on themselves. The problem is that aspects of consumption relating to wellness and personal enrichment are often presented as necessities rather than the indulgences they truly are. Evidence of this is a poignant scene in the movie Super Size Me, in which an obese teen cries with disappointment over her inability to afford the Subway diet, seemingly unaware that nutritious sandwiches can be made cheaply at home. In the immortal words of REM, what we want and what we need has been confused.
Of course, there is a difference between achieving physical health and getting your groove back. Many examples of priv lit, such as the saccharine-smug Under the Tuscan Sun, are about bored middle aged women seeking emotional fulfillment rather than, say, conquering chronic back pain. Nevertheless, there is a thread of continuity between luxury rehabilitation centers and spa vacations. Whether you are meditating out your coke habit at Promises or taking yoga retreats in the Himalayas, fretting about the cost is frowned upon. Luckily for all of us, drug treatment is available at places not frequented by Lindsay Lohan, facilities such as the incomparable Studio 34 in West Philadelphia offer yoga to the masses, and even the most predatory televangelists haven’t managed to eradicate prayer without a price tag. However, consumers are still encouraged to spend indiscriminately on anything that can be justified as healthy or enriching. Saunders and Barnes-Brown are right to come down hard on the wellness industry for encouraging people to go into debt to make themselves feel better.
There’s nothing wrong with traveling to exotic spas or yoga retreats if you have the money. Where I live, you don’t even have to pay very much to do it. Perhaps the proliferation of inexpensive wellness facilities in other parts of the world lends optimism to Saunders and Barnes-Brown’s appeal to the “thousands more whose lives are comparatively uncharmed, who are happier working with creative and healthy alternatives instead of spending on what they’re terrorized into wanting”. Expensive roads to personal growth will no doubt continue to exist, but it’s important to remember that we don’t need to break the bank for wellness any more than we have to starve to death to cure the hiccups. Unless, of course, you’re talking about this guy:
Media credits: writespassage; Fall on Your Sword
Amazing what a charismatic “salesman” could do, even before the age of mass media.