Word: spa
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Concorde, was one of Britain's supreme building triumphs. It resulted from the combined efforts of an unknown road builder, architect and artist named John Wood and his son John Wood Jr., who had taken over the cramped, run-down town of Bath, site of an ancient Roman spa, and rebuilt it into a showpiece of Georgian architecture and a prime example of unified English town planning. The younger Wood's supreme gambit was to take one elliptical segment of the oval form that Bernini used for St. Peter's Square, and throw it boldly along...
This week with the five-month summer water-cure season gushing at full tap, an estimated 50,000 French spaddicts are off to nearly 100 government-licensed "thermal establishments." Somewhere in France is a spa for every hydro-hypochondriac. Each spa is classified by the mineral content of its water and the diseases it is supposed to treat. Rheumatism is soothed at 55 stations; the spa at Encausse specializes in malaria; 27 other places cater to specific circulatory diseases such as heart trouble (Bourbon-Lancy), high blood pressure (Evian) and inflamed veins (Luxeuil...
Three Weeks of Penance. A typical French spa is Mont-Dore, in central France. There, every morning, patients with respiratory trouble bustle out of 275 summer villas and 80 hotels and pensions to queue up at the doors of the fountain pavilion. Each curist carries his own graduated glass, which attendants fill to the proper mark with tepid, slightly bubbly, radioactive water. After a gargle or a swig, the patient sits in a tub of water for 25 minutes while compressed air is forced up, gets a massage, wades into a thick fog of water particles, finally inhales some vapors...
...Vichy, largest and most famed of the spas, where Roman officers dunked their ladies 2,000 years ago, crowds of liverish patients are going through a similar waterlogged routine. Said the director of a Vichy spa: "The Americans aren't coming, or the British either, since the Americans don't get bad livers from their colonies and the British don't get money from the Bank of England. But if you think Vichy is out of fashion, you couldn't be more wrong. We've never had such figures in our history...
Healthy Vacations. One of the incidental consequences of the French Revolution was the establishment of free spas, so that the peasant could wash out his diseases side by side with the rich man. Since World War II, the French social-security system subsidizes a trip to a spa for nearly any suffering Frenchman who can get his doctor to sign his application. Last year the government paid for between 80% and 100% of the cure cost of some 68,000 adults and children...