FORERUNNERS 5 



they had dreaded as the haunts of demons might serve as refuges 

 from the turmoil and wickedness of the outer world. She set up 

 her houses not only on the outskirts, but in the very heart of the 

 Alps not only at Oropa, Novalesa, and Varallo, St. Gall and 

 Einsiedeln, but also at Pesio, Chamonix, Engelberg, and Disentis, 

 on the bleak crests of the St. Bernard and St. Gotthard and in 

 the flowery wilderness of the Grande Chartreuse. The monks 

 collected simples, they attended the sick, and thus the studies of 

 botany and medicine went hand in hand. Glacier ice was found 

 to be useful in fevers and ' most pertinacious toothache,' as well 

 as to cool wine during the summer heats. The Alpine Baths 

 sprang into repute. In the course of the sixteenth century fifty 

 treatises dealing with twenty -one different resorts were published. 

 Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) mentions the Baths of Bormio, 

 and Conrad Gesner (1516-1565) visited them. The waters of 

 St. Moritz were said to supersede the juice of the grape, a quality 

 the innkeepers of the Engadine have, in recent years, been at no 

 pains to advertise. To Pfaffers wounded warriors went to be 

 healed ; and it was reckoned a rival to the Swiss Baden as a scene 

 of worldly dissipation. At the Baths of Loeche, as early as 1501, 

 there was a large inn built by the Bishop of Sion, to which the 

 patients were carried in panniers. Brigue, Tarasp, even remote 

 spots such as the Baths of Masino, in a side glen of Val Tellina, 

 Teniger Bad, 1 in the Biindner Oberland, had their votaries. 



These facts have to be kept in mind in any attempt to ascertain 

 the origin and growth of men's relations to the Alps . In the Middle 

 Ages they were no longer traversed only in haste by princes and 

 pilgrims and commercial travellers, to whom they were mainly 

 important as an inconvenient impediment on the roads to Italy. 

 By means of the Alpine monasteries and Baths men of leisure and 

 of such scientific interests as were alive at the time were brought 

 into daily contact with the great mountains . Hence there arose 

 it is true, in a relatively limited number of cases among men 

 of independent and active minds, a certain interest in the 

 physical aspects and features of the Alps. It manifested itself 

 differently according to the individual ; the impulse might be 



1 Fifty years ago this Badhaus still retained its primitive simplicity. A 

 series of wooden troughs resembling coffins so arranged as to fit into one another, 

 head to feet, afforded opportunity for social bathing. 



