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The Beach Cure: Meggie Crnic
27 Plays1 month ago
Season 4, Episode 5: Dr. Meggie Crnic is a Philadelphia-based medical historian and author of The Beach Cure: A History of Healing on Northeastern Shores. Listen to Meggie discuss the elements that make beach environments therapeutic, a history of floating hospitals on the eastern seaboard and the interplay of science and lived experience when studying healing landscapes.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'The Wound Dresser' Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
You're listening to The Wound Dresser, a podcast that uncovers the human side of healthcare. I'm your host, John Neary.
00:00:21
Speaker
My guest today is Dr. Maggie Cernik. Dr. Cernik is the Associate Director of the Edward D. Viner Center for Humanism at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University. Her main research and teaching interests focus on bioethics, the history of medicine and environmental health.
Dr. Maggie Cernik's Book on Healing Shores
00:00:36
Speaker
In 2025, University of Washington Press published her book, The Beach Cure, A History of Healing on Northeastern Shores. Dr. Maggie Cernak, welcome to The Wound Dresser. Thank you for having me today, John.
00:00:50
Speaker
So your recent book, The Beach Cure, explores the history of healing on the Northeastern shores. ah How does the beach heal us? We're just diving right in. I love it. um you know My interest was really primarily to try to understand the ways in which historically the beach had been imagined as and really understood and experienced to be a therapeutic landscape. um So it's a little bit trickier to answer that for us today. i think a lot of times It has intrigued me to hear the ways in which people have responded to the book and they're like, oh this makes a lot of sense to me. Or i often get, my grandmother always used to tell me like, go to the beach and go swimming. um You know, so I think that we are today left with a um sort of different set of questions, right? And I think that one of the things that really attracted me to study this particular landscape um was the fact that we have lost a really explicit medical idea
00:01:48
Speaker
that The beach as a place can cure us. But historically, this was sort of common medical knowledge. It was accepted medical practice. And what I discovered through my research was that physicians were prescribing patients, including oftentimes children and their mothers, to actually take a trip to the beach and stay there. to either be cured of their disease or to convalesce and recover from the disease that they had been recently suffering from. So that was really my research question. So I don't know if that directly answers what you were asking me or not.
00:02:24
Speaker
But, um you know, certainly there was a lot of historical literature about how and why people thought the beach could cure. Definitely. So can you talk more about like some of the conditions folks would seek out, you know, healing at the beach for and, and you know, how that was therapeutic for them?
Therapeutic Beach Landscapes
00:02:40
Speaker
Sure. So I think one of the things that was really interesting to me is when I started to do the research, I discovered that there were institutions that were founded along the northeastern seaboard as well as throughout Europe um that were dedicated to caring for patients who were suffering from diseases. Now, depending upon where you were, oftentimes the conditions that patients would have would relate to tuberculosis, especially for children. um But there were other institutions like the Children's Seashore House in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where you would see these lists of conditions that were supposed to benefit from time at the seashore. And they seem mind boggling, like 90 some odd different conditions would be represented and would be everything from um recovering from fevers or gastrointestinal diseases to tuberculosis to
00:03:37
Speaker
categories of disease that we don't really talk about anymore, like debility, so this kind of sense of being run down. Sometimes you would even see in the historical records notes of needs change of air as the diagnosis. right So it was really this sort of, it was a really incredibly wide range of conditions that doctors advocated.
00:03:59
Speaker
for in terms of the beach being a therapeutic destination. So, and why it was beneficial kind of dependent upon what you had, but there were a couple really common ideas. One was that the seashore as an environment was beneficial because of the air, the sea air. And not only was that because it was seen as being much fresher It had things like ozone, which was believed to be advantageous. um It also, physicians would talk about it as being devoid of either ob noxious effluvia, if you were in the 19th century, or being free from bacteria.
00:04:37
Speaker
but so and then the movement of the air was always being refreshened. And so if you can think about, and I think this actually makes sense even today, if you can think about what it's like to be in the middle of a city in the United States in the summertime and how hot it is, right? And it can be, it can feel really oppressive, right?
00:04:57
Speaker
Going to the beach where you have open space and air circulation that's moving around, it's cooler at the beach, kind of makes sense. I think that that as an environment would feel healthier, right? from the movement of the air. So air was one, seawater was another. um And that was not only because of the chemical composition of seawater, right, which is actually where we get saline solution from, right? So in the 19th century, physicians were sort of talking about the seawater as being really curative. It would help clean out wounds and would really inspire healing and even growth for kids.
00:05:37
Speaker
that was a sort of another composition. Also, if you're going into the ocean, you naturally have to move more. So was sort of seen as this sort of physiological response. um They would also talk about the physiological response of going into really cold water. So for any listeners who, you know, might have ever done a cold plunge or have been reading about the kind of trendiness of cold plunges right now, a lot of the descriptions of patients going into the Atlantic Ocean sound really familiar in terms of how physicians were talking about the benefits. So patients would go into the really cold water. They would experience this like shock and this constriction. um
00:06:16
Speaker
And then all of a sudden their body would start trying to warm itself up and it would release blood and all the circulation was believed to be beneficial, but you didn't want to stay in too long because if you stayed in too long, it could kill you. And they have these wonderful tracks that are, um provide patients with incredible warnings about what might happen if you stay into the sea too long, especially if it's too cold and you're not strong enough to withstand it yet. um But overall, people believe that if you sort of dosed sea bathing and did it correctly, especially under the watchful eye of a physician, that it could be incredibly beneficial to sort of stimulating health.
00:06:52
Speaker
So the third sort of element was really sunlight. And sunlight was believed to not only sort of enhance health and well-being generally, but by the late 19th and early 20th century, physicians and scientists were really talking about sunlight's bactericidal properties. And they were also tying it to specific conditions like rickets um as being directly beneficial and curative for people who were suffering from those types of conditions. um Now, at the time, there was not the sort of understanding of rickets as being a nutritional deficiency. And so it took
00:07:22
Speaker
decades to actually determine that it was a vitamin D deficiency, right? So sunlight was really the anti-rickeits intervention. So you sort of saw this combination of factors, but it was really, although people were distilling the environments in specific ways to try to figure out like what were the therapeutic mechanisms, for a really long time, it was much more of a holistic sense that the environment as a whole was really beneficial.
00:07:52
Speaker
We'll get back to you know all those elements in a second, but I'm
Global Beach Healing Practices
00:07:55
Speaker
curious. So were these theories mainly being carried out on the northeastern shores or was this something that was going on around the country, around the world?
00:08:02
Speaker
And that um was was was there anything special about the the kind of the healing practices this at the northeastern shore? but um No. um That was really a decision of mine sort of focus on institutions and places, um because that was at least within the United States where most of the practices were centralized. um There were similar conversations going on in Chicago, in British Columbia. There was international conferences that were sort of dedicated to sort of marine medication. So there was a whole host of um people who are dedicated to studying this and sharing information about it. And there was these really transatlantic patterns of communication where people physicians were sharing their knowledge and expertise and helping to inform one another's practices. So I can't say it's global global, but um there were similar institutions to the ones that I focus on in my book in Argentina. So there was two seashore hospitals in Argentina, and then there was
00:09:09
Speaker
dozens and dozens and dozens across Western Europe. So at the very least, it was kind of like a Western hemisphere conceptualization that was really prominent and popular. um And every place had like slightly different ideas or slightly different formats. But by and large, they really shared this kind of scientific understanding of the benefits of place.
00:09:32
Speaker
And so, yeah, as as you were alluding to earlier, you kind of have the the sunlight, the sea water, the sea air. And it seems like as you get into the 20th century, those get kind of like narrowed down into the very like reductionistic ah approach.
00:09:46
Speaker
So I think it's like they were kind of practicing holistic health like before, you know, before it was cool again. in the So is, you know, in in writing this book, did you truly find, you know, that the sum of the beach elements is greater than its parts?
Shift from Holistic to Reductionist Medicine
00:10:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think in some ways it's – I like how you frame that. It's not necessarily exactly how I was thinking about it. I was mostly curious to sort of see, like, what was that process and asking the question of, you know, why don't we think of the beach in the same ways anymore? So what happened? And one of the things that I discovered is that with the rise of scientific medicine – and this um drive and this quest to try to figure out, okay, well, why is this working? We know that it does work.
00:10:30
Speaker
We see physical proof. People are improving after they stay at a beach. Why? the more the scientific process was kind of applied to these environmental interventions, the more it focused our attention and but frankly kind of restricted our view. And like, what were the really specific therapeutic elements, right? And so it just became a sort of like increasingly distilled Um, so it's not really that anybody ever said like, oh, that was such a stupid idea. Like nobody ever rejected the idea as being, you know, silly or cane or like, oh, wasn't that so cute? Can you believe we used to think that, um, it was much more this kind of like gradual erosion of our ability to see the whole package, but be able to really see certain elements as being like the elements that were incredibly beneficial. Um,
00:11:21
Speaker
And so I think that it was an interesting kind of tension that existed because I think what I expected was people to eventually be like, that was ridiculous. Like now we have germ theory. Now we know. um And that's just actually really not what ended up happening.
00:11:35
Speaker
Do you feel like, but in in kind of your explorations of this, does study environments like the beach or, you know, other natural environments, is that, are they kind of better off being studied through a qualitative lens? Because you get that feedback more from like the effects on people and like, as opposed to like the quantitative lens that sort of narrows things down to like a single element.
00:11:57
Speaker
I'm kind of gonna i'm going to say both and. um I think that science is incredibly powerful. Like it's incredibly powerful to understand how and why it was that sunlight or UV rays eventually have real physiological effects. Like that is incredibly powerful knowledge.
00:12:16
Speaker
However, I think sometimes when we do that, we can lose sight of like, what are the other things that are actually happening? Because i think science is so incredibly capable, at focusing our attention on one element, right? It sort of requires that, right? um But when we do that, like, what about all the other stuff that's happening? And like, environments are messy, and bodies are messy, and we don't always standardize it. And it's not possible to hold these things um in isolation in the way that scientific experiments really sort of demand that we do. um So I think that there is an element of, I would love to see us be able to consider how can we grapple with these questions in a more holistic fashion? How can we take embodied and lived experiences and think about how that matters or what that might tell us that is additive to the scientific knowledge we already have? So I think that that's really where the power is, is thinking about can we actually figure out or think about a way to take those experiences that people have and try to understand them and take them
00:13:23
Speaker
ah seriously and put them alongside of the scientific knowledge we all also have. Right. Because that to me is like that is the really like the it's the sum of the parts is greater. Right. And so I think that that that whole is really could be very, very powerful. Now, how do we do that? I don't know.
00:13:37
Speaker
I don't know the answer to that quite yet. We don't have great systems, but it has been really exciting to see the number of scholars and scientists out there who are generating this really incredible knowledge.
00:13:51
Speaker
um So in your your book, it was the first time that I heard about ah this idea of floating hospitals. I had no idea that these really existed in Atlantic City, New York, Boston. I was even more fascinated to learn that the one in New York, I think you said closed around September 11th. The one in Boston didn't close until like officially had no beds open until like 2020. So can you talk more about the the rise and fall of these floating hospitals?
History of Floating Hospitals
00:14:18
Speaker
Sure. that is actually how I got into the project from the beginning. um i had been living in Boston, so I had heard about the Boston Floating Hospital. I knew it as a pediatric hospital that was very landlocked um in the middle of the city of of Boston.
00:14:37
Speaker
And it wasn't until I moved to Philadelphia for graduate school and i was doing another research project on children the history of children's health and pediatrics. And they came across a photograph of the Boston Floating Hospital. And I saw it was a ship.
00:14:54
Speaker
And I just thought like, oh, well, that makes so much more sense that it was a boat. And that's why it's the floating hospital. um and But frankly, I hadn't given it a lot of thought.
00:15:05
Speaker
in terms of like why it's named what it was named. And so I decided to dig into it a little bit more and to try to figure out like why was it that people in Boston were taking like mothers and frank infants and toddlers onto a ship and floating them around the bay of Boston, especially during the summer months. So I started digging into those a little bit more.
00:15:32
Speaker
And as you suggest, I found that it wasn't um only in Boston, but also in New York City. And I became incredibly intrigued as to the sort of medical rationale that supported this. And it turned out, you know, it was very much part of this larger environmental ethos that the cities were sort of dangerous. They, particularly for infants, there was really high much or infant mortality at the time. um And so the belief was that if we if people could provide these infants and children and their mothers, with a brief escape during the hottest moments of the day and take them out to the bay where there was fresh air. And they would actually um pump the water from the bay up into bathtubs and bathe the babies. And nurses would give mothers instructions on childcare. They would feed everyone. If they had toddlers who were of kindergarten age, they would even have like little school lessons for them. And it just struck me as this incredible, um,
00:16:36
Speaker
intervention that was, you know, sort of promoted and not only promoted, but really embraced by women and children during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. um Mothers would clamor to get onto these boats. This was nothing that people were being forced to do or dragged aboard. um It was really a very popular intervention.
00:17:02
Speaker
And so what happened to them? um Eventually, as there was increasing knowledge and scientific knowledge about the sort of specific benefits of certain elements, people were able to sort of replicate some of the benefits that people used to be able to receive on the boat, but in urban hospital settings. So specifically something like UV lamps, had been around ah for a while and they became increasingly precise and increasingly easy to use and less expensive to use and less cumbersome to use, which allowed them to sort of replicate the health giving effects of something like sunlight, um which children used to access on the decks of boats, but now you could do it in front of a lamp inside of an urban hospital. And so at least in the case of the Boston Floating Hospital,
00:17:49
Speaker
It caught fire and burned to the water, which is a strange thing to say. um But it burned and it was destroyed. Thankfully, nobody was on board and nobody was hurt. And this was in the late 1920s, I believe, like 1927. And when that happened, the um the board that was in charge of the hospital sort of met. And at first they were going to rebuild it as another ship. And then they sort of thought, like, do we need to do that or can we actually move it on land? And they decided that you know the environmental benefits were no longer quite as necessary at that time. And they decided to move it into the city.
00:18:27
Speaker
How many beds were in a lot of these hospitals? That's such a good question. um I don't know the answer to that for the Boston Floating Hospital. But if you look at pictures from the Boston Floating Hospital, they weren't actually so much beds as they were hammocks. So there would just be these like huge open um ah sort of bays on different levels of the ship. And there would just be like hammocks strung in between poles. And there would be like little tiny infants and children who were like nestled down in them. um the mothers would be sitting aside. There were nurses whisking in between all of them. um
00:19:04
Speaker
Some of the seashore hospitals, which were obviously like not floating, but always landlocked, but located directly on beachfront property. Some of those would start off very small with like, you know, maybe a dozen beds and they eventually grew to hundreds of beds. And there were some institutions, I believe in Europe, that were even much larger than that. So they could be pretty um large in size eventually.
00:19:26
Speaker
I know you said the fire with Boston, but what what were some of the other factors that led, like, I guess also the implementation of those technologies in more like urban settings, but was there anything else that kind of led those ah hospitals to decline?
00:19:39
Speaker
Yeah. So there's a few things. And, you know, I think one of the hardest parts of the history that I was telling is that I don't have a very neat and tidy end point. There was nothing that happened that suddenly everybody just agreed like, okay, we're abandoning this as a project. um So I think it was a combination of factors. One was the sort of shifting sort of scientific and medical knowledge production that was occurring.
00:20:02
Speaker
Pediatric hospitals were increasingly um ah sort of popular, right? The profession of pediatrics was really sort of formally established around 1930. So you sort of saw a localization of experts in urban pediatric hospitals increasingly.
00:20:20
Speaker
There were also financial considerations. So most of these institutions were philanthropic. And so they were very largely dependent on people donating money. And so when you got to the 1920s and then eventually get to the stock market collapse, you don't have the same kind of resources and investment anymore into those types of structures. So it's changing financial systems. It's changing medical knowledge.
00:20:48
Speaker
There is, of course, like a sort of a benefit and desire on the part of physicians to not have to send all of their patients to the seashore, as well as parents of not having to necessarily like board a ship or go to the seashore, but receive care closer to home. So it was really this kind of combination of factors so that you actually sort of saw this gradual decline or move away from it. Or if people needed to build a larger hospital, sometimes like the finances just weren't there. So the projects got abandoned, but there were other, you know, hospitals, John, like to your point, like the New York floating hospital remained for a really long time and into century.
00:21:27
Speaker
twenty first century um the Children's Seashore House in Atlantic City, New Jersey, that existed in Atlantic City on the beach until 1990. Although like the patient populations that they treated kind of changed over time, the institution itself still stood there until it eventually combined with Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. So every one of them follows a slightly different trajectory in the United
Role of Working-Class Mothers in Beach Therapy
00:21:51
Speaker
States. And there what isn't one clean reason as to sort of why we no longer have them today.
00:21:58
Speaker
Another big ah player you mentioned ah in terms of creating the the beach as a place of healing was working class mothers. Can you talk more about the role ah they had in in in making the beach a healing place?
00:22:12
Speaker
Sure. So as a historian, um one of the things I... sort of expected to find was either sort of like maybe more like I i thought I was going to find conflict. I thought I was going to find mothers who were sort of like resisting practices or, you know, maybe feeling understandably nervous about sending children because some mothers would actually put their children on trains in places like Philadelphia and they would, you know, take a multi-hour train ride to the beach to stay at an institution by themselves.
00:22:44
Speaker
And given what we know about his hospitalization during this time period, most people didn't want to be hospitalized. They were not places that were associated as much with um health and healing as it was sort of, especially in the 19th century, a place you would really go to die. um Parents we know from historical records often feared putting their children into pediatric hospitals because they worried they would be used as experimental material. um They wouldn't have easy access to them. So I had kind of approached a lot of these um spaces thinking I was going to find, if not resistance, at least concern about these practices.
00:23:24
Speaker
What I found was that mothers were incredibly eager to partake in marine medication. They would go to great lengths to access a trip to the beach for their children and sometimes for themselves along with their children. um And not only that, but they were creating these incredible networks of care where they were going to these hospitals with their friends or their neighbors or their mothers or their parents. sisters or sisters-in-law. And they sort of really maintained a lot of the familial connections that they had throughout their home environments in the city and kind of transplanted those down to the seashore.
00:24:07
Speaker
And so i was not surprised to find that they were incredibly savvy. I was surprised to find that they were as eager as they were to take part of a sort of hospitalization um system as it existed. And more than that, what I found is like there was such an incredible number of them. And through the historical record, i was able to sort of chart instances where mothers were sort of really sharing the knowledge and their experiences and encouraging other people to take advantage of the these hospitals um or like health homes or other cottages that existed. at the beach as something that was incredibly beneficial to them. um
00:24:54
Speaker
And as they were sort of sharing that knowledge and it sort of transferred between the city and the shore, it really struck me that working class mothers were doing a lot of really important and meaningful work that established the beach as a place that was appropriate and accessible um for people from all classes, as well as for families. um And I thought that that was part of the history that had really not been told before. We often think of the history of tourism as being something that's more limited to like the elite and upper classes. And here you have this incredible example of these working class mothers going to incredible lengths um to access a trip to the beach for themselves and their families, even if it had to be through a hospital. They were really important makers of that place.
00:25:47
Speaker
Yeah, no, I definitely, you know, I've i've been to like, ah visited Newport, Rhode Island before. And yeah, you think of like going going to the beaches like these big, like, you know, Vanderbilt mansions or something. But yeah, no, I- Yeah, no, this is not the breakers, John. This is definitely not the breakers.
00:26:04
Speaker
But yeah, it's it's it's nice to think that, you know, at least, especially like the Jersey Shore, it was more of like a communal thing where a lot of people could take advantage of the beach. And you had many pictures in your book where it was like, The the shores just looked like they were totally saturated with people. like There was just so many people kind of taking in taking in air, taking in the water, taking in everything. so Yeah. And there was other locations like Coney Island that were much more accessible. So, I mean, I think there there are really important class-based dimensions to sort of certain seashore towns, um right? And each town has its own sort of specific history around that. But they were they were they were there. They were really prominent. And yeah, like I, yes, those pictures is where it is saturates the The best word, like sometimes you can barely see a speck of sand in between all the people that are like standing and lounging on the on the shore.
00:26:56
Speaker
Yeah, you think when you go to like, you know Ocean City or something that it's crowded, but not not compared yeah to what it once was. um I think as much as like the your book was about the beach it was too about like cities in a way like how how cities affect health. Can you talk about, you know, the effect ah cities, particularly, I guess, during the night late 19th, early 20th century had on people's health?
Urban vs. Beach Environments
00:27:20
Speaker
Sure. So part of the question I was trying to answer is, you know, why did the beach become a therapeutic environment? And what I came to believe and argue is that it didn't really exist unless it was being contrasted against something. And think it was being kind contrast contrasted against what were urban environments. So there were these really sort of shared concepts that living in the city could make people sick, It could steal and rob health. It was particularly dangerous for children for a variety of reasons. um
00:27:53
Speaker
And, you know, people would trace it both to things like the sort of densely populated areas that people and homes that people were living in. So obviously, if you can think about epidemic diseases um as really kind of like ravaging cities. And people knew this, right, that urban environments were far more susceptible to the impacts of contagious diseases. So Right. As far back as, you know, the 1700s, if there was an epidemic that would strike a city, one of the most common objectives was to get out of the city as fast as you could and go as far away as you could to try to escape the pestilence of the of the plague. Yeah.
00:28:35
Speaker
So I think that- Sounds like a familiar, right? I know, doesn't it? Well, yes, I was going to say teaching teaching a history of medicine class during the pandemic was wild. um And there were so many resonances of ah what had happened historically in terms of the ways in which we found ourselves living 2020 and 2021, Yeah.
00:28:54
Speaker
um You know, but I think that in addition to those elements, a lot of people were also looking at the very specific environments of cities as being deleterious and damaging to health and well-being. And it was for, you know, sort of really a whole variety of reasons, right? And It sort of is the inverse of what I was saying before, where the seashore had lots of fresh air. Cities were understood to be really devoid of fresh air. And especially during the 19th century, where we had different conceptualizations of ah illness and health and well-being, right? If you were like, this is an era of miasmatic thinking, where people believed that the sort of foul, rotting emanations that were coming out of organic material um would sort of infiltrate the air and that air could infiltrate your body and make you sick.
00:29:44
Speaker
um So foul smells were an indication that there was something dangerous to one's health nearby. um And if you can kind of grapple with that, I mean, it's a different way of thinking about you know illness for sure. But if we kind of accept that that made sense to people, um right, cities were pretty smelly places. um i have some amazing colleagues who have written wonderful histories on this, including um one of my friends, Melanie Keechel, who wrote Smell Detectives, who was really looking at the the sort of the smellscapes of cities in the 19th century. and so...
00:30:22
Speaker
You know, you have people looking at the ways in which pollution was clouding the skies and, you know, impacting one's ability to breathe fresh air. You have, you know, the sort of the limited sunlight. You have, you know, the sort of the smells that are swirling around you constantly. And then you have, you can see people dying during epidemics. You know that children die, many, many children die before their first birthdays. And you know it made sense to people that if this was a dangerous environment, they needed to find some place that could operate in contrast to that. So that's sort of how I sort of think about the seashore as existing as the sort of salubrious solution to the issues that were resulting from people's sort of like lived experiences in urban environments at that time period. Yeah.
00:31:16
Speaker
and do you feel a lot of those things remain true today? Or is it, um you know, you you could think on one hand that there's more access to health care, more sort of probably better public sanitation and things like that in cities today. But also, you know, when you think about like social determinants of health, that cities aren't necessarily the healthiest places. So if you feel like that kind of a trend has continue continues to persist?
00:31:40
Speaker
Yeah, it's ah it's a great question. I think it's different. um But I think that we are grappling with, you know as you said, some of these sort of social determinants of health. um And we know that you know things like that cities are hotter, that we have heat islands, um and that negatively impacts health and well-being.
00:31:59
Speaker
you know There's also pollution and car exhaust, and that can contribute to like long like you know sort of health issues with ah asthma and things of that nature. So there are certainly um ah trends and i I can see connections there. So I think it's it's different um because you're right, like sanitation is so much better now. right I do not take for granted plumbing and the fact that we have trash pickup. like Those are amazing systems that we have in place that you know for many people, even well into the 20th century, like they didn't have indoor plumbing. You might have apartment buildings that were
00:32:39
Speaker
ah you know, had thousands of people sharing two outhouses in New York City. Like, right, like this is not something we, generally speaking in the United States, really contend with anymore. But I do think that people have been charting the ways in which certain urban environments can negatively influence health. um But I don't, I think that those are, you potential opportunities for us to sort of continue to think about because I don't think that there's anything that says it has to always continue this way. I don't think that urban environments are intrinsically unhealthy, right? I think we have the ability to think more creatively about how we can make them healthier environments, um which then directly, i think, impacts the lived experience of people living in those days and the health experiences of people living in those environments.
Urban Planning and Environmental Health
00:33:29
Speaker
Yeah, I think all that's really fascinating. It gets it a lot into, you know, healthcare, public health, urban planning, all sorts of different things. I don't know. Yeah, I continue to think that there's, we can do a lot more to bring like nature and even sort of a flavor of the beach to cities. I i know when I was, um I was able to visit Hungary and they have these like public baths there. I don't know if you've ever heard about those. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
00:33:55
Speaker
And like thinking like, you know, that's sort of bringing a taste of the beach to to a more urban area and feeling like, hey, we could probably do a lot more things like that. I guess i guess a lot of the the constraints we run into are are space, spatially, that we can't create like green spaces because there's limited space in cities. But figuring out other ways to bring some of those elements from nature, from forests, from the beach into the city is ah hopefully something we'll continue to work on.
00:34:24
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that people are like and I i take a lot of um or I derive a lot of sort of inspiration from the work that people are doing, including sort of regreening efforts or thinking about, you know, sort of how can we plant more trees in certain environments. And there are things that, you know, I think we can do that are actually relatively low lift solutions in a lot of cases. um And you're right, like some cities are obviously incredibly constrained in terms of the space. um especially with things like you know housing costs and everything else. So it's always a really delicate, I think, balancing act. But I think there's still a lot of opportunity there for us to explore. And at least like to your point about bringing beach into into the city, it's it's where we got sandboxes, John, right? So if you ever played in a sandbox as a kid, right? That was us bringing the beach into the city. Right, right, right.
00:35:19
Speaker
I'd always lose things sandbox, I remember. that ah They're dangerous that way. Yeah. um So yeah, like moving moving forward though, do you feel like in in doing a lot of this research that you found clinicians to be on board with this? And and do you feel like, you know, soon physicians may start writing more prescriptions for for nature or the beach? I know you mentioned in your book, there's ah one, I think researcher who who coined like nature deficiency disorder um or something to that tune. And i don't know, if you do you see that ah clinicians will will start being more
00:35:57
Speaker
you know, forward and and prescribing these sorts of things? You know, that's a great question. I know people have, and there are people I have worked with and spoken to who believe in the sort of transformational power of being outdoors. But I think the question of, you know, can we prescribe it is a really tricky one especially in the United States, given the ways in which our financial systems are set up. Right. So the question is like, who's reimbursing for that? Or like, how do you fill that? What does that mean? um you know, for certain people, like, how do you access it? And I think one of the things that really strikes me about seashore therapies in the late 19th and early twentieth century is that there were these incredible systems that people came together and built to facilitate um and make it easier for working class families to access these spaces. So railroad companies were um reducing the cost of tickets so that families could afford it more easily.
00:37:07
Speaker
Hospitals were building single-family cottages on the property so that mothers could come and bring their children and stay with them. While they were there, they would either not have to pay or pay a really nominal fee, and they would receive like all of their meals in addition to their accommodations.
00:37:26
Speaker
so you So you sort of see the ways in which there were all of these groups that were coming together to whether or not to finance it, the physicians and the nurses who were running it, the families who were participating at the industries that were ah you know also helping to finance it.
00:37:43
Speaker
And they were trying to think about, like, how do we solve this problem collectively? And I think it's going to take something like that to happen again. And I think it could. I'm an optimist. So I think it could happen. But I think the question is, like, how? How do we get the right people at the table? And how do we try to convince people that this is something that's worth investing in?
00:38:05
Speaker
Well, it it sounds like a lot of, yeah, what you're you're talking about is getting people to the beach. But then also when you're you're at the beach, you know, I grew up going to Ocean City and that was like, a you know, ice cream, amusement park rides, like consumerism, like like souvenirs and all that. Like, do we want to you think rethink the beach and and sort of making it less of a sort of amusing place and more of like a salutary healing place? Mm-hmm.
00:38:33
Speaker
Oh, that's such good idea. You know what, John? I haven't thought about that necessarily. um You know, i would be hesitant to tell anybody what their beach should and shouldn't look like in a way. um I would simply love to see us be able to think about and grapple with the ways in which we feel and the impact it has on our bodies and our health and our well-being and try to reconceptualize, you know, what is it beyond
00:39:04
Speaker
you know, the sort of, I think of enjoyment and stress release and all of those things are really important. And I think that the Jersey Shore offers that for so many people. um And frankly, there's a nostalgia effect that I think is really important to not cast aside.
00:39:20
Speaker
So I think if we can kind of maybe reintroduce those other elements in addition, it just kind of makes the seashore an even more alluring place to visit.
00:39:31
Speaker
Yeah, the the complete package, right? Family fund, health benefits. um Yeah, I could see some marketing person from the one of the short towns going for that, right? Oh, and they had them they had them historically as well. And yes, that is absolutely partially how they were thinking about it. Recreation was always part of the you know part of the draw.
00:39:54
Speaker
ah My last main question would just really revolve at this point around environmental stewardship. ah You know, I think that's a point that comes up frequently in your book that, you know, we do have a changing climate. We do have ah in a changing environment that's going to affect the way we can ah enjoy enjoy the beaches in the future. And i don't know. Do you have...
00:40:19
Speaker
do you Do you have a sense of optimism ah regarding that about how we'll you know ultimately you know continue to take care of our our beaches and our environment? environment I hope so. I think, honestly, the beach as an environment holds such important connection for so many people um that I do have hope that people will continue to sort of recognize the importance it has to them.
00:40:48
Speaker
And, you know, one of the things I hope also occurs, and turn and I'm glad you asked about environmental stewardship, is that I think if we can understand the ways in which humans are intrinsically connected with the places where we live and we work and we play and we go to school and we go on vacation, I think it can inspire us to think about how are we really taking care of these places and are we taking care of them? And i think it can, if we put ourselves back, if we put humans back in their environments um and reconnect with them in those very real bodily sort of health um ways, then we can maybe reimagine like what is possible? Like what does it what would it actually mean to really like sort of take care of this, you know, place so that it can, you know, continue to, in a way that sounds really cheesy, but like so so it can also take care of us. Like I think it's a really –
00:41:48
Speaker
um there's a lot of potential for it to be mutually beneficial. And it's hard to see if we don't conceptualize of our bodies and our health as being inextricably entwined with those places.
00:42:02
Speaker
With that, it's time for a lightning round, a series of rapid fire questions that tell us more about you Okay. um So what's your favorite beach to go to? Oh, um Cape Cod.
00:42:14
Speaker
In general, big, lots of beaches there, but Cape Cod in general. Favorite activity to do at the beach? Oh, it's so hard. This is not lightning for me, John. I'm i going to say like sort of ah really like sort of digging in the sand with my kids.
00:42:36
Speaker
What's ah a food you have to eat when you you go to the beach? Oh, pizza. Pizza. Which I think sounds weird, but we always go after. It's more of an after the beach, but it's always an after the beach pizza.
00:42:48
Speaker
Yeah, nice. You know, you're all sunburned, your feet are all sandy, and you just go out to the place and and grab a slice, right? A hundred percent, yes. Yes. Pizza tastes so good after you've been on the beach. I don't know what it is.
00:43:00
Speaker
What's your go-to wellness practice? Going for walks every night. What is the next book or major research paper you're looking forward to working on?
00:43:13
Speaker
I am currently working with some amazing colleagues, including Erin Friedlander, who is a pediatrician at CHOP. And we are looking at the ways in which sort of reconceptualizing space can benefit ah not only individuals who are neurodivergent, but sort of like populations more broadly. and we're looking at all sorts of different places, including museums.
00:43:40
Speaker
And lastly, what's one change you would like to see in health research? Creating more space for lived experience as constituting sort of um knowledge about bodies and health.
00:43:59
Speaker
Dr. Maggie Cernik, thanks so much for joining the Wound Dresser. Thank you so much for having me, John.
00:44:14
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Wound Dresser. Until next time, I'm your host, John Neary. Be well.