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BY JOHN MORRISON 2 The town's fortunes might have taken a very different turn. Back in 1848 it seemed that Milltown might become a spa town to rival Ilkley or Harrogate. The chance discovery of a source of brackish water encouraged the members of the Town Council to let their imaginations run riot. They assumed, since it tasted so foul, that the water must have invigorating properties. And the smell was even worse than the taste, which seemed to clinch the argument. The first person to exploit the potential of this water source was Dr Ernest Bloor, a local practitioneer bored with treating mundane complaints, like warts and veruccas, and listening to his elderly patients rabbit on about their aches and pains. He was destined, he felt, for better things. Which is why he established a small sanatorium, close to the spring, in the hope of persuading the great and good to come to Milltown and have their hypochondria pandered to in convivially upmarket surroundings. If he was going to spend his life dealing with imaginary maladies - and it looked like he was - he reckoned he should get well paid for his troubles. The sanatorium's brochures presented an upbeat impression of the town, illustrated with pictures that owed little to reality and a great deal to the artist's imagination. A pristine example of Dr Bloor's brochure can be found in the small museum collection created by the Milltown and District Natural History Society, which, more than a century later, has still to find a permanent home. With the collection currently split between three secret addresses, the easiest way to acess any of the museum exhibits is to sidle up to one of the ladies in the Tourist Information Centre, rap three times, discreetly, on the counter-top, and whisper, sotto voce, "The geese are flying tonight". Dr Bloor and his Cold Water Cure enjoyed a moderate success; for a couple of years the town was full of surprisingly fit-looking people being pushed around Johnson's Park in bath-chairs. After a few days of the cold water cure, and being reassured about how sick they really were, the health of most visitors declined in a gratifying manner. Unfortunately, there was little provision for dealing with genuine ailments, so whenever minor chills developed into pneumonia, the further application of cold water only made things worse. Too many of Dr Bloor's patients died: an inconvenient state of affairs which ended the treatment before it had had a proper chance to work. Dead people also created a lot of time-consuming paperwork. With the immediate families of the deceased being reluctant, under the circumstances, to settle his bills, Dr Bloor had no choice but to file for bancruptcy. Instead of being welcomed into the upper echelons of Milltown society, Dr Bloor was struck off the medical register. He suffered the further ignominy of being blackballed by the members of the Union of Charlatans, Shysters, Mountebanks, Quacks, Hucksters and Snake-Oil Peddlars (still in existence, but, since the amalgamation of 1983, now operating, as the Union of Charlatans, Shysters, Mountebanks, Quacks, Hucksters, Snake-Oil Peddlars and Affiliated Workers in the Advertising and Public Relations Industries), which takes a bit of doing. Milltown never became the spa town that Dr Bloor had envisaged, and he died a bitter and broken man. Yet, in pandering to the delusions of gullible people, he unwittingly became a role model for the new-age charlatans who came to Milltown in more recent times.
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