‘An adept in medicine’: the Reverend Dr William Laing, nervous complaints and the commodification of spa water

Abstract

This essay addresses mineral water as a medical, experimental and economic material. It focuses on the career of the Reverend Dr William Laing (1742–1812), a physician and cleric who wrote two pamphlets about the water of provincial spa located in Peterhead, a town on the north-east coast of Scotland. I begin by outlining his education and I then reconstruct the medical theory that guided his efforts to identify tonics in the well’s water. Next, I explain why Laing and several other local inhabitants thought themselves to be authorities on the palliative power of the water and I close by showing how such effects were commodified by local entrepreneurs. Although I concentrate primarily upon Peterhead Spa, this study touches upon several issues relevant to the types of medical theory and chemical experimentation that were being used in provincial Scotland during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Introduction

In 1793 the Freemason’s Lodge of Peterhead, Scotland, celebrated the institution of a new pump room in which residents and visitors could enjoy a drink of the town’s wine-coloured spa water. After paying an admission fee, customers could sip at their leisure as they played card games and browsed the newspapers. Although the salubrious effects of the water had been known for centuries throughout the north of Scotland, Peterhead’s new trading links to the Baltic, Holland and England insured the arrival guests who knew nothing of the well’s virtues. For these potential customers, and for incredulous Lowlanders to boot, the Reverend Dr William Laing wrote a pamphlet that used chemical analysis, personal testimony and local case histories to substantiate the tonic power of the town’s mineral well. Entitled An account of Peterhead (1793), it was printed by T. Evans in Paternoster Row, London and was then sold in the capital, as well as Peterhead, Aberdeen and Edinburgh. Over a decade later, in light of the commercial success of the well, Laing wrote a follow-up ‘Appendix’. It was entitled Account of the cold and warm sea baths at Peterhead (1804) and was sold primarily in Aberdeen.

To bolster the Lodge’s attempt to make the water a therapeutic commodity, Laing strategically appropriated practices and theories that were the domain of medical chemistry. As the eighteenth century saw a proliferation of chemically orientated mineral well pamphlets, his work was part of a larger genre that sought to use chemistry to commodify the substances contained in local spa water. Even though comparative studies have sought to identify the chemical and commercial relevance of such pamphlets, monographs and books, little research has been done on the local contexts that engendered them. One of the main obstacles preventing studies on such publications has been the obscurity of the provincial authors who wrote them. For example, other than the brief biographical summaries devoted to Laing in Scottish episcopal clergy and the Fasti academiae mariscallanae Aberdonensis, the contours of his life remain murky.² Indeed, he does not even have an entry in the Oxford dictionary of national biography. The lack of such studies makes it quite difficult to explore how local actors became scientific authorities and how they used their expertise to make mineral well water a medical commodity. In Laing’s case, the situation becomes even more intriguing when one considers that he was both an ordained priest and a practising physician. It is therefore the purpose of this essay to use Laing as case study to investigate both the making of a local medical authority and, by extension, the skills that allowed him to transform the substances contained in Peterhead’s mineral water into viable medical commodities.

Following in the footsteps of the insightful surveys of eighteenth-century mineral wells written by Noel Coley, Roy Porter and Alistair Durie,³ I will begin by briefly outlining Laing’s early education, his subsequent career as a priest and the events that led Aberdeen University to award him a medical degree. Turning to his chemical analysis of the well, I will then show that he was primarily interested in iron, fixed air and the temperature of the water—all three of which were tonics, that is, substances believed to have an ameliorative effect on the body. Although he held that these three substances could restore the imbalance that had been created by a wide number of diseases, I will only concentrate on how he believed that they could cure nervous disorders. Throughout my reconstruction of Laing’s familiarity with the literature and principles of contemporary medical theory, I will emphasise that he believed himself to be a local authority on the well’s contents and therapeutic value. As the essay draws to a close, I will address other local commentators on the well and how Laing reacted to their assessments. I will end by explaining how Laing’s research fit into the larger context of well’s commodification, especially in regard to its importance to the Freemason’s Lodge and the city in general.