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Meghan Crnic, "The Beach Cure: A History of Healing on Northeastern Shores" (U Washington Press, 2025)
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Dr. Megan Sarnick
Massachusetts welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Megan Sarnick about her book titled the Beach A History of Healing on Northeastern Shores, published by the University of Washington Press in 2025. Now, today we go to the seaside for lots of reasons, some of which were in fact reasons that have been around for quite a while as we're going to talk about in this book. And we do it all the time. We don't really think that much about it. Maybe we worry about getting sunburnt or something like that, but it's generally seen as like a fun, healthy thing to do. This book demonstrates that that's actually a pretty new thing to think about. And I don't think there's a better way to illustrate just how radical a transformation this is in our thinking than the opening paragraph of the book. So listeners, I'm going to read it out to you to start off our conversation. Beach vacations should be counterintuitive. We bring babies and young children who cannot swim to a place where seas swell, waves crash, and undertows can whisk even the strongest swimmers out to open water. We hop over scalding sand to stake a small space amongst scores of strangers, a group we otherwise condition children to think of as potentially dangerous. We bathe bodies beneath the bright sun that toasts us in the short term and possibly causes cancer in the future. Children play in sand that can swallow and even bury them alive. Now, that doesn't sound like a great place to go to improve the health of yourselves or your children. So how exactly did we get to the point of thinking that that was in fact a good idea? That's what this book helps us understand, and I'm sure our conversation will too. So, Maggie, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about your book. Thank you.
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Dr. Megan Sarnick
Thank you for having me.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write the book? What questions are you asking in it? How did this whole thing develop?
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Dr. Megan Sarnick
Yeah, absolutely. So I currently am the associate Director for the center for Humanism at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, which is located in Camden, New Jersey. And before that I was at the University of Pennsylvania, where I earned my Ph.D. in history and sociology of science. And while I was there doing research as a graduate student, I stumbled across an image of the Boston Floating Hospital. Before I had moved to Philadelphia, I had lived in Boston for about a decade, and I knew the Boston Floating Hospital as a very landlocked institution in the middle of the city of Boston. And so when I saw a picture of the Boston Floating Hospital when it was actually floating on the ocean as a ship, I it was one of those lightning strike moments where I thought, well, of course that makes so much more sense that it was a ship, which is why it was floating. And then as I dug in to this institution and started looking at it, I came across these amazing images of mothers and these long dresses standing next to hammocks with children sleeping in them and nurses bustling around these open air wards and units that were on the ship. And then my favorite image was of a row of toddlers who were completely naked, standing, peering over the side of the ship. And it just struck me that this was such an interesting and somewhat unfamiliar way of thinking about treatment. Like, why were people putting babies and toddlers on ships? And why did we think that this was going to be healthy for them? And so that really inspired me to sort of look more deeply into the sort of practices and medical beliefs that Were underpinning these institutions.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Sometimes an image really does have a thousand words or a thousand questions embedded in it. Often a very interesting place to start focusing then on these children. They're clearly at the center of a lot of concern at this point. We're talking primarily about sort of 19th century east coast US. Why were these seen as places that maybe especially children were in danger from, Needed to have an escape from?
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Dr. Megan Sarnick
Yeah. So this is one of the things that was really interesting to me is that as I dug into places like the Boston Floating Hospital, I came then across all of these seashore hospitals more broadly. And it turns out these were an international phenomenon. So you could find seashore hospitals specifically for children all across Western Europe. Belgium loved a seashore hospital. I want to say they had nearly 20 of them at one point in time, One of the largest and first was served Parisian children. So I don't want to sort of give the misunderstanding that these were a uniquely American phenomenon, because they certainly were not. But one of the things that tied all of them together was a belief that removing children from the city and bringing them to a healthier space like the seashore would really benefit them. Because cities were really seen as almost uniquely dangerous for children. And there were so many reasons as to sort of why this was the case when these institutions started. This was still a time in which people embraced miasmatic thinking. So this idea that you could smell disease and ill health was. Would permeate your body through these heirs that would have disease that was sort of, like, built into them. And I think it's really hard for us today, Miranda, to think about and, like, really embrace, like, what was it like to live in a city in the 19th century? These were times and places, at least in the United States, where people had livestock that lived in the basements of their houses. The livestocks would roam the streets. There wasn't plumbing, There was nothing electricity, There weren't sewers for the most part. These were all things that were being developed. And things like fresh fruits and fresh vegetables would be available. Right. But there was all of this kind of idea around sort of, like, access to sort of healthy. Not only food, but air and water. And especially within the sort of environmental constraints of the city, Things like fresh air and sunlight were really hard to access. And coupled with the sort of piles of refuse, and people would be dumping their kitchen slop outside of their window, and then it would sit in the alleyways where it would kind of like, fester and rot and smell. Right. So you would have these sort of ideas that I was always struck by as I was reading. I was like, wow, this city looks so different than what I think we are used to today. And people were really concerned. And they were concerned because they would see these children outside in the streets, playing amongst sort of piles of garbage in these very hot, very sweltering spaces, and they were concerned. And I think coupled with that, there was this emergence of recognition that cities were unhealthy. In addition, because we were really seeing the rise of infant mortality statistics, so there was actually sort of putting a numerical value on just how dangerous it was. And so not only would people sort of see it and experience it firsthand as parents or even just walking down the streets, but you had public health officials sort of decrying the fact that up to one in four children would be dying before their first birthdays. So you were sort of getting a lot of points of information and data from all these various sources, both lived experience and public health officials that were sort of really driving home that point that cities were incredibly dangerous, Especially to some of the youngest children who lived in city spaces.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is so key that it's not just coming from one source, because there's of course, always the sort of inflated sense of like, oh, well, is this really a danger or just people saying it's a danger? I don't know. There's a bunch of different things going on here. If the sea then, or if the city then is dangerous, what makes the sea a good alternative? I mean, the whole sand bearing you undertow, it's fine. Okay, let's. Let's accept as facts cities were not great. Why. Why is better though?
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Dr. Megan Sarnick
So that's. I think that what was one of the things I was really interested in trying to figure out was what was it about the space that was really driving, especially medical professionals to write prescriptions for patients, especially children and mothers from working class neighborhoods, to go to the beach and to use seashore and seashore based institutions. And as an environmental historian, I think that one of the things that really struck me was the ways in which they were looking at the physical space as being so intrinsically different in all the most important ways from the city. So if cities were spaces that were crowded, that lacked fresh air and lacked sunlight, the seashore offered all of that in abundance. Because at least in the sort of mid 19th century in the United States, for the most part, the seashores were largely undeveloped spaces. So there was an abundance of space, there was an abundance of land, and it allowed people to really look to the space as sort of the antithesis to all the problems of the city. It gave children access to space and fresh air and sunlight. And then seashores had the added benefit of having the sunlight enhanced because it was reflecting off of the ocean. So it was really this sort of space that I think operated in very close connection to, but in opposition of the cities that children were coming from.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, cities are bad. Still not entirely persuaded, I think, on the being a better idea. So was. Am I the only one who's skeptical? I mean, if medical professionals are going, oh, well, it's the opposite here. Like, did everyone else sort of go, oh, okay, you've kind of got a point, or were they having to make a bit of a case? Because surely I'm not the only one who's going, wait a second, the sea sounds dangerous, right?
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Dr. Megan Sarnick
And I think that that was one of the interesting things is that the seashore is actually kind of different than the sea. And for a long time, people look to the sea. Sea as being an incredibly dangerous space. So anybody that had worked on a ship or was forced to immigrate or chose to migrate, they would have all shared that conceptualization. The sea is definitely dangerous, right? They. The sea swells, there's sea monsters and creatures and big waves and all of the bad things. I think it was a little bit more. The seashore at least offered a space that I think was able to sort of be a little bit more of a blank slate that people were able to sort of, like, write new ideas upon at this moment in time. And so I think you're absolutely right. I think we have these kind of conceptions, like, maybe it's dangerous, and we do have to be careful. And I think one of the things that actually occurred was that physicians themselves were like, hey, now, wait. We have to be careful with how we're actually using the space, right? So it's not just like you just go there and you bake out on the sand all day long and you swim as much as you want? They had very sort of. They attempted to at least tightly control the practices that defined, like, what made a space healthy or less healthy. And honestly, Miranda, in the beginning, there were some people who would go down there and think, like, what is this space? It is completely underdeveloped. There's not enough infrastructure here to actually make this sort of comfortable. And so it took a while to actually sort of build up those infrastructures to make it feel sort of more accessible and safer. But I do think that, you know, for me, I Did I shared your sort of questioning? Right. I think I shared your question. Like, was it really so bad? Like, was this really just a. A lot of boosterism where people were trying to sell the seashore? And of course, there's a piece of that, Right. You had people who were trying to sell the seashore and make a buck. But I think more than that, what really came across was the ways in which these families that were choosing to send their children to the seashore or go to the seashore with them, I think they really were struggling with the confines of trying to raise kids in this environment of urban cities in the 19th century with very limited resources. And when they were able to access a place like a seashore hospital, it provided them with all of this sort of support and infrastructure, as well as their children, a safe place to go and play under sort of the watchful eye of a lot of other people, including health professionals. So I think it really allowed them this sort of. This comfort and this ease to bring their child to a place where they weren't going to be hit by a car, where they weren't going to be at risk of being arrested by a police officer for playing stickball on the street, which was, like, what would happen sometimes where they could swim in an ocean. That was largely at that point in time still very, like, unpolluted, which was in stark contrast to the ways and places that children could access in the city, which were things like the rivers, which is where the sewer, if they had them, would sort of dump into, or other spaces that were really obviously to at least the sort of actors who I study seemingly sort of cause ill health. So I think it was just this, in some ways, I don't want to say it was a blank slate because it wasn't quite that people who were very deliberately constructing new ideas. But I do think it offered this kind of space of relief and respite from a lot of the pressures that families were feeling. So I really tried to take them seriously. Like, I was skeptical, but I did sort of try to take their perspectives, like, to heart and really dig into, like, what were the reasons why people would agree to do this and actually see them. And I think at least, you know, according to them, like, they. It really was offering them these advantages that this. They could not access otherwise within city spaces.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so that, I suppose, makes sense in the big picture terms of, like, why would they even consider this? Can you maybe give us some examples, as you do in the book, about some of the sort of specific ways that Doctors or other medical professionals tried to convince people. I mean, they had all sorts of evidence going on. Like what sorts of things were they citing?
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Dr. Megan Sarnick
Sure. So one of the things that almost immediately occurred was that they would be sending children. They would write prescriptions to children from, for mothers, for their children to go down to these spaces like seashore hospitals. And that would exist sort of up and down. They were sort of dotting along the northeastern shore of the United States. And increasingly physicians became really curious about, you know, what, what, why actually were these spaces healthy? Because they were seeing it. They were seeing physical transformations in the patients. They would send patients down who were sick, who were having trouble eating and keeping on weight, and they would come home and they would talk about them as these kind of round, brown and sturdy children. And they were celebrating this, but they were curious as to why and what were the effects. And what initially began as a sort of vague notion of the seashores being healthy eventually became a little bit more distilled into an identification of the sea air, sea water and sunlight as being the sort of healthy elements that were really helping to transform these children's health and well being. And then that wasn't quite enough. So then they kind of dug a little bit further and started asking questions as to what, you know, what specifically about each of those elements made it healthy. And they distilled it a little bit further. And so the sea air eventually became about sort of ozone. And this idea that ozone was going to be beneficial to the patients. Then with the sea water, it was really about the saline that was in it as sort of washing out wounds and inspiring healing. And then within the sunlight, it was about UV rays and the ways in which UV rays could actually sort of recalcify bones. And they would take X rays that would sort of show children's progression as well as photographs that would show children's progression over time from being sort of bent over double under the weight of various conditions, including tuberculosis, which often occurs in the bones in children or something like rickets, which creates sort of bones that are a little bit spongier. So they would actually have. Many children would have bowed legs because of the weight of their body. And you would see those recalcification that was occurring. So increasingly they, these physicians were publishing in some of the most elite journals of the day, including JAMA and the British Medical Journal and New England Journal of Medicine. So this was really elite circulating knowledge that was reinforcing these ideas that the seashore was really a healthy place. And then for the Public. They were producing primers on this. They would actually write public sort of public health books that would say, like, you two should go to the seashore, and here's why it's so beneficial, and here's how you can do it in a way that will not put you at risk of some of the dangers that are. You can find there, but make sure that you inspire your health and well being.
- [18:58]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hmm. Okay. That's helpful to have more detail about kind of the specific elements there that are being discussed. But so far, we have been talking about the medical side of things, which, as you've been explaining is really important, is kind of how this all opens up. But of course, today we talk about going to the sea, not so much for the medical benefits of the sunshine. We talk about it more for fun. So how did that transition happen?
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Dr. Megan Sarnick
Yeah, well, it happened very quickly. People pretty quickly learned that going to the seizure was pretty enjoyable. And one of the really noteworthy things is that you asked previously, sort of, how did physicians convince people? It didn't really take much convincing, frankly. People were pretty readily going down there, and what they discovered was that there was a lot of enjoyment about being around other people. You would see these images of places like Atlantic City, New Jersey, where the. The sea would be bloated with bathers, and they would be in these long black bathing costumes, and the seas would. Would turn black with the number of people who entered into those spaces. And when people came down there, even if they were ostensibly engaging in these somewhat therapeutic practices like sea bathing or sunbathing or walking on the boardwalk, where you could have the benefits of the sea air swirling around you, people who were going down primarily as tourists really quickly discovered that a lot of the practices that were being heralded as therapeutic and medically beneficial were actually just a lot of fun. And I think my favorite example of the ways in which tourists really changed medical practice and transformed them into something that looked more like pleasure and fun and leisure that we would associate the seashore may be more with today is in Atlantic City, the use of rolling chairs. Rolling chairs are something that people today still remember. They still exist. And when I looked into their history, what I discovered is that the first proprietors of those rolling chairs had actually designed them and marketed them to people who were too sick and too weak to actually walk on the boardwalk themselves. And they would rent these rolling chairs. They were wheelchairs to people who were visiting. And those folks would be required to supply their own nurse or their own pusher to give these individuals the benefits of the boardwalk and the sea air that would be, you know, circulating around them. And as any good businessman will do, he they recognize very quickly that other people were looking at this as a potential way to sort of travel up and down the boardwalk. That seemed kind of fun. And very quickly tourists start renting them who were totally healthy, who did not need the sort of mechanical assistance to be moving down, up and down the boardwalk. And within just even a couple of years, what started as a medical device had transformed into something that was far more about pleasure and leisure and seeing and being seen, that it really was about an intervention for those who could not otherwise physically move themselves up and down the boardwalk. So I think that to me, like, really crystallized a lot of the ways in which people were consuming healthcare practices and through that consumption, sort of transforming those associations to a point where it almost seems impossible to look at a rolling chair today and think of it as a wheelchair and a medical device.
- [22:40]
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- [23:05]
Dr. Megan Sarnick
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm so glad this is the example you used to tell us about this aspect of the transformation because it has stuck in my head like it's such an evocative image. And there are some photographs, listeners in the book of these people in these chairs. And let me tell you, they do not look sad or sick or unhappy to be there. They look positively gleeful despite their obviously very historical to U.S. clothing. So, yeah, no, definitely a lot of fun to be had with, you know, long boardwalks that are paved and lots of chairs you can just zoom around on. So I'm glad you've explained that transformation to us, but it's in fact, on the point of consumers that I'd like to go to next. Because when we're talking about travel and leisure, so people leaving the cities and going to somewhere nice where they can have fun, we're often sort of assuming that we're talking about people that have, for example, enough money to do that, that this isn't something open to everyone. And yet what you were telling us earlier about kind of all the reasons the city was bad would also obviously be worse for the people who didn't have the money to sort of have nice fancy houses. So can you talk about the role of working mothers in establishing these patterns and institutions, both in terms of physical institutions and sort of social norms around going to the seaside every summer for sort of health and fun of children?
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Dr. Megan Sarnick
Absolutely. It was one of the most exciting things that I think I discovered through my research, and I loved it because it was so counterintuitive. Having read the history of tourism and leisure, which I think is just such a wonderfully rich historiography, working class folks are often kind of left out of it. Like, it gets framed as this, like, upper middle class or middle class phenomenon, that those are the folks who really defined what leisure looked like. And of course, there's some scholars who've done wonderful work that have also shown the ways in which working class individuals have sort of shaped environments through their leisure practices as well. But I was really surprised to see just how many women were shaping associations of the seashore who are coming from working class backgrounds and neighborhoods within Philadelphia. And this really became sort of highlighted for me as I was sitting in the archives at the College of Physicians. And they had these old mother's cottages walkbooks. So on the grounds of one of the seashore hospitals that I was studying, they built little individual cottages. And those cottages were meant for women who could otherwise not afford to spend a week at the seashore because it was pricey even then. So they built this infrastructure on the grounds of the hospital. And they were meant for individual families to come down. And so they were tracking the mothers who would come there. And as I was sitting in the archive, I was flipping through and trying to take notes and seeing if there Were any patterns that were emerging. And at one point I recognized that there was. I kept seeing Tree street in Philadelphia reference, and I thought, like, well, it was such a distinctive name. And I thought, well, wow, I just, I just saw that and I flipped back in the pages and what I found was that, you know, in one, in one month, there was a woman who went with her children. And about three weeks later, her next door neighbor went. And I just thought to myself, well, wow, like, I bet, I bet the first woman went down with her children and came back and talked about this experience with her next door neighbor and recommended it to her. Now, of course, I didn't have any evidence of this. Studying working class mothers and children and families is often sort of reading between lines and being able to interpret ideas through actions and behaviors. And so I knew I did not have evidence that that was actually what had occurred. And so I continued to flip through the logbooks and until I got to the next year. And those two families went again together to the same hospital and brought along another neighbor with them. And I just thought, like, wow, they are actually accessing and choosing for themselves to go there. And they're spreading this knowledge among their networks, right, that this was a place where you could go and you could bring your children and it would offer certain kinds of reliefs and benefits and rewards. And as it turns out, the more I sat with these documents, the more I uncovered these really amazing and sophisticated uses of these institutions where women would be going. And there were some accounts of. There are, in fact, many accounts of mothers going down and bringing entire whole families of healthy children to a hospital. And the only thing I could really conclude from that is that these women were using these spaces as tourist destinations, right? They were accessing a week vacation for themselves and their kids at the beach. Now, it seems maybe it was, it seems kind of maybe bizarre today to think about going to a hospital as a vacation destination. But if we can sort of embrace what these mothers would have experienced there. They had people who were cooking the meals, who were helping them clean up. There was multiple times they were traveling with sisters or cousins or their mothers. Like mothers and daughters would be going together, neighbors, and they would be. Some families would go back every year, the same week of the summer, and bringing their kids in tow. And so I think that the ways in which they were really able to sort of establish the seashore as a space where they belonged and they shared that knowledge throughout their networks when they returned home, I think really had a lasting influence on the ways in which we sort of continue to use the beach as a space of mass recreation. Right. It's a space where, you know, we. We people from all sorts of different backgrounds all converge and really share a lot of the same practices that look familiar today as it did then.
- [30:04]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting to uncover. Even as you said, it does require reading between the lines and piecing bits of information into a larger picture. Is there anything further we can then push this to in terms of understanding more widely? I mean, taking your point about historiography in terms of how we usually understand the development of mass leisure and travel in the U.S. yeah.
- [30:26]
Dr. Megan Sarnick
I mean, I think it really is looking at those spaces and being open to thinking about, you know, who are the different people who are there and how are they using it. And even if it's not maybe looking like some of the typical ways or the typical uses. Right. Doesn't mean that people weren't contributing actively to defining what leisure culture means. Right. And it's not. It's maybe not just one thing, but it's a multitude of different ways in which I think people are using these spaces. And so I think that, yeah, looking at the sort of. The practices and looking at, you know, into different types of spaces that we might not have typically looked at because this wasn't. These weren't people who certainly had built their own houses down there or their own cottages or were even accessing hotels, but sort of maybe looking at the sort of unexpected places and then asking the questions of, like, well, what was the experience like there and how can we maybe uncover those stories? I think there's a lot of really rich history that remains to be told. But, yeah, looking at different places and different populations and being a little bit creative with the ways in which we're using sources and kind of not being afraid to, you know, look into archives and records that, you know, maybe aren't the most exciting, but I think hold just incredibly rich stories within them.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Always love a good shout out to an archive.
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Dr. Megan Sarnick
I mean. Right. And archivists are amazing.
- [31:56]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yes, archivists, librarians, absolutely amazing people. And so much cool stuff can be found there to answer all sorts of fascinating questions like the ones we've just been discussing, as well as one I'd now like to throw at you, if I may. Maggie, please. Did any of this actually work? If we go right back to the beginning of, like, cities are so bad. Oh, no. Okay. They actually do seem pretty bad. The sea will fix it. I'm still not convinced, but people then were so fine. Did this Actually, like, help children's health.
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- [32:27]
Dr. Megan Sarnick
So I love. I love that question. And, you know, but it's taken me a while to love that question because for a really long time I was like, no, it's not, like, didn't work. It's like, understanding why people thought it worked. But now, honestly, Miranda, I'm willing to say, like, I think it did. I really think it did, because there was just so much evidence that was being produced and consumed, and then even the fact that people were willing to continue to use these spaces. And the children's seashore house actually in Atlantic City, which was one of obviously my primary sites, which is why I keep referencing, was actually in Atlantic city until the 1990s. So these species had an incredible longevity. Now, they. They changed over time. But I do think that the fact that they were able to remain and remain so popular for as long as they did, I think is a testament to the fact that people found real benefit from them. And although it sounds, I mean, the number of conditions that physicians would claim were that benefited from or were cured by the seashore seems insane to us today. Just absolutely, like, there's no way that this is true, you know, But I think that there was a lot of evidence that children really did come back from the seashore and feel better. Now. It wasn't. It was not a cure all. Like, not everybody got better, but it was really pervasive and it was really popular. And there was a lot of evidence that for children who were suffering from things like tuberculosis or rickets or other sort of conditions, a lot of times they were chronic conditions, the seashore really could benefit them. And there was another sort of class that got a lot of attention at the time that really we don't have anymore today. And so debility was something that was often seen as being particularly benefited by a trip to the seashore. And debility is a really nebulous category. Right. We don't. We don't necessarily go around talking about having debility, but in the late 19th and early 20th century, there was all various categories of debility. There was simple debility and other types of debility, but it was really sort of a state of being run down and at risk of disease. And they didn't use that term at risk, but it was kind of this larger conceptualization. And what they would find is that kids who went down maybe like, sort of weak, maybe a little bit sick maybe, you know, sort of a lot of times they were talking about how they would be like, puny quote, unquote puny, like these little skinny, you know, children, they would go to the beach and they would talk. Physicians would talk about their awakened seashore appetite. And Miranda, thankfully, I had a really wonderful physician who wrote a lot of very evocative annual reports, which are normally terrifically boring to read, but he was a great storyteller and he would talk about how there were two children who were sent down from a city hospital and there was explicit instructions that they were to be forced to eat because they would refuse to eat and they were never hungry. And the physician there reported that no intervention was necessary along those lines because as soon as those patients arrived, they started eating massive quantities. And so you would see these incredible transformations of children who would come back in like, really robust health. So sometimes it was about sort of having disease that was ostensibly cured, and sometimes it was actually about sort of an improvement of health and well being overall. And that conceptualization, at least at the time, was that having a more robust health would really sort of allow children to do better once they got back to the city. So we would allow them to kind of survive the sort of, you know, harsher winter months in greater health and well being before they could go back to the seizure again the following summer. So to answer your question, I think it did work. And at least, at the very least, people then believed it work and they saw the physical evidence in the bodies as they were flowing between the city and the seashore. There was visual proof.
- [36:27]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And of course, people believing something works is incredibly powerful. So definitely worth highlighting that as well. If it was then such an established thing. And I love the example of the house that was still there until really quite recently, because that, you know, people are still going, it's still supply and demand, tells its own story. I suppose, then it's probably an overgeneralisation to say that kind of we've completely stopped thinking of the sea as being healthy in any sort of way. You know, fresh air is still good and all those sorts of things. But I don't think we necessarily see doctors writing prescriptions for it the way that they did then. So when and why did that stop?
- [37:06]
Dr. Megan Sarnick
So this was a question that oftentimes plagued me, was trying to really pinpoint that answer. And one of the things that I found that was so interesting to me was that despite these incredible changes in medical belief systems, right? So there was this shift from a miasmatic, very environmental way of thinking about health and bodies and their interconnections with the places in which people lived and worked and played and with the rise of germ theory in the 1880s, where suddenly, right. It wasn't about rotting filth that infiltrated the air and entered our bodies through all of its pores. It was about germs, right? And that there would be this sort of this promise that suddenly we would be able to cure disease with a single shot, which of course did not happen right away. But there was this sort of transformational impact on the ways in which people thought about health and disease and disease causation. So Marina, I kind of had thought that what was going to happen was that suddenly people, physicians were going to decry, like, we were so wrong. This was such a silly idea that we had. How could we have thought that the environment could be curative? Right? Because if the cause is a germ, it didn't necessarily make sense that the cure would be the seashore. And really, actually what I found was that there was no such turning away from these environmental interventions. And I think that a lot of that was because people were still trying to grapple with this question of how can we enhance health and well being when we don't have, you know, targeted cures yet. They were. Those were still sort of in the future. So there was a really just sort of a slow decline and move away from some of these really explicit environmental ideologies about the seashore as a medical therapy. But there was never a moment in which we said we were wrong. And so what actually sort of ended up happening a little bit was that increasingly, as physicians distilled the environment into sort of more and more and more reductionist parts, so things like UV rays or saline, simultaneously scientists and physicians were developing technologies that could really supplant those and be used in any environment, including city spaces. And so one of the things that I became interested in was how we were able to sort of adopt these technologies that approximate it, the same kind of medical interventions that were afforded by the seashore. But it was just so much more convenient and enabled physicians to treat so many more patients and facilitated families staying together in the cities rather than trying to send. Figure out how to send a bunch of children down to the seashore or other environments, frankly, like the mountains were also still popular. And so there was this sort of tangle entanglement of technologies with nature that kind of let us reproduce a lot of the really healthy aspects of the seashore in any environment, regardless of where you were. So I think we just sort of slowly saw this dissolution of these ideas. And I think we're sort of still left with some vestiges of those sentiments. So, you know, there are people, and obviously not everyone, but there are people who really will come to me and say, like, you know, the beach is my happy place, like that is the place I go. That is, it's restorative for me. And I think for some people, they still sort of, they feel that benefit. Right. They know it in some way, shape or form, but we've lost a way to explain it in really explicit medical terms. Right. That makes sense in terms of physical health. And so we talk sort of about more ephemeral categories of, you know, mental health or, and, or well being, I should say, and how people sort of feel better and they sense that they're better, but it's not sort of curative in that same kind of way.
- [41:10]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Is that maybe starting to change a little bit? Thinking about, for example, forest bathing and the ways in which. Obviously in Japan that's a very established tradition, but even in the uk that's starting to be something that's talked about, even for example, by the nhs.
- [41:23]
Dr. Megan Sarnick
I think it is coming back and, you know, I think we're trying to grapple with what does this mean and how can we understand it. And there are certain sectors and groups of scholars who have, you know, been talking about this for quite a while actually, like medical geographers have been doing wonderful jobs tracing out what are the ways in which our environments can sort of enhance our health and well being. But one of the things I'm really intrigued to see how it plays out is whether or not we sort of stay, stay in this moment of trying to figure out the precise mechanisms of why forest bathing is healthy. Right. Do we run the risk of repeating the same sort of trajectory that seashore therapies faced, which is, oh, well, you know, this is beneficial because of these singular elements and what happens if we can reproduce those singular elements in other spaces. And I think that that is, you know, something that I'll be curious to see. Like how does that impact the ways in which we understand our health and well being in connection with environments? Like, is it a more holistic sense or are we going to sort of fall into these reductionistic patterns again?
- [42:31]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, we shall certainly have to find out. Is that where your research is taking you next, or do you have a different next project you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [42:41]
Dr. Megan Sarnick
So I have a one project that I am working on next. One of the things that I became really intrigued by through this research was the ways in which hospital buildings themselves were really sort of seen as a part of the medical intervention. Right. But I was struck by when I would look at pictures of places like seashore hospitals, there were almost. There are very seldomly people inside of the hospitals. For the most part, the hospitals were really a portal to expose patients to sort of the healthier environments that lay outside. So there were lots of verandas and sun porches and solariums and decks, and there was these wonderful expanses of seashore that would be used as a place where most patients would spend our days. And this really inspired me to reconsider the building and the built environments themselves and the ways in which we think about or don't think about those as holding sort of potential to sort of heal or enhance health and well being. And there are some scholars who are starting to think about sort of the ethics of architecture. And so my new project is sort of trying to reconsider the ways in which hospitals and clinical clinics and other healthcare spaces might be able to be harnessed to actually inspire health of not only patients in terms of giving them the medical treatments that they need, but can it actually go further? Can it actually enhance community health? Can it actually provide a space for the staff and employees where they actually feel that their health is being sort of cared for as well in those same spaces? So it's a little bit of a shift, but it's still about the environment and still about health. But I'm curious to think, like, can we actually reimagine the spaces that we're building right now? Because at least here I can look out my window and see that we've just broken ground in Camden, New Jersey for an incredible expansion of our hospital system. And increasingly, the medical campuses are dominating our cities in our city skylines. And so I think there's a real opportunity here to think about, can we start creating spaces that are really caring for our communities in more holistic ways?
- [45:02]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hmm. All right, well, that definitely sounds interesting. Best of luck with the project.
- [45:06]
Dr. Megan Sarnick
Thank you.
- [45:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
In the meantime, of course, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled the Beach A History of Healing on Northeastern Shores, published by the University of Washington Press in 2025. Maggie, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [45:20]
Dr. Megan Sarnick
Oh, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you for having me, Miranda.