Healthy Living in the Alps

Book excerpt: "Healthy Living in the Alps" explores the juxtaposition of the search for health as a cure for illness and its opposite, the celebration of health by the physically sound by examining the extraordinary parallel development of sanatoria and winter sports in Switzerland. The history of sanatoria and of winter sports between 1860 and 1914 is told in this comparative study that examines the relationship between the search for relief from respiratory diseases, such as tuberculosis, in high alpine resorts and the development in the same places of winter sports tourism. Four out of these five resorts owed much of their initial fame to their reputation as health centers: Davos, St Moritz, Arosa and Leysin. The first winter visitors to the Swiss Alps began to arrive in the 1860s and in the first four sentries they were health seekers, many of whom were encouraged to take outdoor exercise as part of their cure regime. They also had healthy visitors and companions who sought recreation while the invalids were resting as part of the sanatoria routine. Demonstrating that this is not just part of the history of Switzerland but of Britain too, biographical backgrounds of British visitors to the resorts give depth and context to a history of health and winter sports tourism by looking at the kind of people who would spend months of the year in the Alps. A discussion of the application of modern technologies creates an overall view of the growth of health and sports tourism in Switzerland.