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Is it not generally believed that our town is a healthy place … a place highly com mended on this score both for the sick andfor the healthy? . . And then these Baths - the so-called ‘artery’ of the town, or the ‘nerve centre’ … Do you know what they are in reality, these great and splendid and glorious Baths that have cost so much money? . . A most serious danger to health! All that filth up in Melledal, where there’s such an awful stench - it’s all seeping into the pipes that lead to the pump-room! Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, 1882 Henrik Ibsen gave the ‘truth about mineral water’ more than 100 years ago in An Enemy of the People. His examples came not from the decadent bathing spas of Bohemia or Victorian Britain, but from the very edge of polite society, subarctic Norway! His masterpiece illustrates the central role that groundwaters and, in particular, mineral waters have played in the history of humanity: their economic importance for towns, their magnetism for pilgrims searching for cures, the political intrigues, the arguments over purported beneficent or maleficent health effects and, finally, their contami nation by anthropogenic activity, in Ibsen’s case by wastes from a tannery. This book addresses the occurrence, properties and uses of mineral and thermal groundwaters. The use of these resources for heating, personal hygiene, curative and recreational purposes is deeply integrated in the history of civilization.
