Hay fever holiday: health, leisure, and place in Gilded-Age America

Abstract

By the 1880s hay fever (also called June Cold, Rose Cold, hay asthma, hay cold, or autumnal catarrh) had become the pride of America's leisure class. In mid-August each year, thousands of sufferers fled to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, to the Adirondacks in upper New York State, to the shores of the Great Lakes, or to the Colorado plateau, hoping to escape the dreaded seasonal symptoms of watery eyes, flowing nose, sneezing fits, and attacks of asthma, which many regarded as the price of urban wealth and education. Through a focus on the White Mountains as America's most fashionable hay fever resort in the late nineteenth century, this essay explores the embodied local geography of hay fever as a disease. The sufferers found in the White Mountains physical relief, but also a place whose history affirmed their social identity and shaped their relationship to the natural environment. And, they, in turn, became active agents in shaping the geography of place: in the very material relationships of daily life, in the social contours of the region, and in the symbolic space that nature inhabited. In the consumption of nature for health and pleasure, this article suggests, lies an important, yet relatively unexplored, source for understanding changing perceptions of environment and place and the impact of health on the local and regional transformation of the North American landscape.