FEATURE
THE HEALING WATERS of Dawson Springs
Jesse H. Wright, MD, PhD, Sohaib Khaleel Mohammed, MD, Samreen Fathima, MD, Rif S. El-Mallakh,
MD, Alisha Beard, BA, and Steven Lippmann, MD
D
awson Springs, a community in
Hopkins County, southwestern
Kentucky, is a small town today.
But in the late 1800s and into
the early 1900s, it was a beacon
for medical tourism. Surrounded by rugged
cliffs, caves and mines, it is near, but not on,
the Tradewater River. Because the town was
not on the river, settlers needed to obtain their water from wells dug
into limestone. Today, Dawson Springs gets its drinking water from
Lake Beshear, a surface reservoir built by the Kentucky Department
of Fish and Wildlife Resources in 1962.
Washington Hamby, a new arrival to Dawson Springs, drilled
a well on his property to obtain drinking water in 1881, but found
that it was considered “unfit for cooking” due to a high iron and
salt content [1]. However, the same minerals that gave the water its
undesirable taste were considered to be beneficial to health. During
this era in American medicine, mineral water was said to be of great
8
LOUISVILLE MEDICINE
value, and lithiated waters were claimed to cure a large number of
diverse medical conditions (Figure 1) [2.3].
In the late 1800’s, writings of Alexander Haig and a prominent
British physician, Sir A.B. Garrod, popularized the idea that gout
was the cause of many human ills, and that lithium should be used
to treat people with gout [2]. Lithium, in high concentrations, can
dissolve uric acid crystals [4]. Only one of the wells in Dawson
Springs actually contained lithium, and the level was relatively
modest (Figure 2). Yet Dawson Springs physicians, such as Drs.
A. G. Darby and G. W. Brown, popularized the local water for
medicinal purposes [1].
One of the problems that the developers of this destination faced
was the name of the village. Dawson, the original name of the town,
didn’t have the desired clout for advertising purposes. In 1874, the
name Dawson Springs was chosen, even though there is only one
spring in the area. The decision to change the name was, in some
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