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Healing holidays? Itinerant patients, therapeutic locales and the quest for health

This special issue on medical ‘tourism’ draws upon the panel ‘Healing Holidays’ held at the Society for Medical Anthropology’s 50th anniversary conference in 2009. The issue brings together anthropologists and historians whose work addresses the historical evolution and contemporary transformation of the traditional spa built around the iconic image of ‘taking the waters’, and the more recent phenomenon of medical ‘tourism’, with its super-speciality hospitals and clinics that repair and replace organs and body parts, or assist infertile people in their quest for conception. The final article addresses medical travel websites that serve as mediators between patients and their destinations in their itinerant quest for health. The articles as a whole problematise whether holidays can be healing and whether healing can be a holiday, exemplified by the often-raised question of whether the spa is medicine or vacation. Using different perspectives and ethnographic contexts, the first five articles address the spa – which in the contemporary imagination is associated with a pleasurable vacation with some health thrown in, best described by the currently popular word ‘wellness’. Partly fashioned by literary and cinematic conventions, this picture of the spa is often used as a form of social commentary on the contemporary middle class. In earlier eras, it was used in much the same way to comment on the aristocracy and the rising bourgeoisie. Or, as is the case in the opening article, spas could be used in the mid-nineteenth century America to craft a distinctly southern ideology of race identity. This function has its counterparts in the spas of the colonial tropics (Jennings 2006) and continental Europe. While this vein of using the spa as a form of social commentary runs through all the articles in this issue, these papers also, and in fundamental ways, point to the fact that until recently in the Euro-American world, the spa lay within the provenance of conventional medicine. This is still the case on the European continent, where the traditional training in medical hydrology, balneology, and climatology available in formal curricula evolved into the specialty of spa medicine. Although not everyone in the medical profession in Europe endorse its ‘scientificity’, spa medicine (or ‘thermalism’) is a legitimate practice in the continent.