Gurgle, Gargle, Guggle

When Mark Twain toured Europe in 1891, he discovered that France had just the treatment for his rheumatic right arm: a soothing bath of spring water at Aix-les-Bains. "I began to take the baths and found them most enjoyable," he wrote, "so enjoyable that if I hadn't had a disease I would have borrowed one just to have a pretext for going on."

Frenchmen still agree that the water cure is as much a treat as a treatment. From their beginnings they have resolutely tried to drown their ills--real or borrowed--in the country's 2,500 springs that are laced with such life-giving elements as arsenic, sulphur, carbon, magnesium and uranium. "More than one person sang the praises of wine," wrote French Poet Paul Valery. "I love water."

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 to complete the morning treatment. The afternoon brings more of the same. Specialties elsewhere: bath and poultice, shower in a hammock, intestinal irrigation "drop by drop."

At 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."

One buxom lady cure taker explained Vichy's thriving business as well as the philosophy that keeps all the spas going: "Three weeks here in the summer and I can eat what I like the rest of the year."

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.

Although no doctor knows quite how the springs work, there is some evidence that they often work very well. One follow-up survey showed that the water cure helps between 53% and 70% of patients with certain types of asthma, improves more than half of the patients with skin diseases. Most French doctors let their patients take the waters on the theory that they will do no harm, and may do some good. "Cures always have a hygienic value," says Professor Pierre Delore of the University of Lyon's Faculty of Medicine. "They are an occasion for giving calm and also for ridding the system of its poisons. They are healthy vacations."

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