The search for health is a constant in all societies, but the increasing wealth of Victorian society made it a realizable priority for an ever-widening clientele. And given the limitations of conventional medicine, with its reliance on techniques such as bleeding or drastic drug regimes, it was not surprising that a galaxy of alternative therapies offered themselves, which were then denounced as quackery by the profession. Some of the fringe movements were chimeras that flourished briefly and faded as quickly. Others showed more staying power, and among the weightier was hydropathy, a system centred on the use of a series of water treatments which originated in Austria in the 1820s at the Gräfenberg establishment of Vincent Priessnitz. Hydropathy was but one of several unorthodox medical therapies on offer in early Victorian Britain. Where it differed from the other fringe movements – mesmerism, galvanism, botanism and even homeopathy – is that it attracted substantial long-term commercial investment. Whereas homeopathy, the most successful of its competitors on the medical margin, remained almost entirely a clinic and surgery bound enthusiasm, hydropathy established its place on both the therapeutic and the physical landscape. The first hydropathic, or water-cure, establishments in Britain appeared in the early 1840s in and around London, subsequently spreading west and north. In England, it was, however, to become an increasingly provincial interest, surviving in its original curative form by the 1880s only at a few northern outposts such as Stockport.