Change of Air Travel & The Commodification of Leisure

I recently took a trip to a lake house in Wisconsin and joked with friends about how the stay was a welcome break from dissertating, and that my fragile constitution was improving. Everyone laughed, even though none of them were graduate students focusing on energy and labor at the turn of the century, like me. Traveling to the seaside (or in my case, “lake-side”) for a change of climate and fresh air in hopes of improving physical and mental health retains certain familiar appeal. Even if acknowledged through laughter rather than treated as a serious health practice, “Change of Air” travel persists.  

My lakeside experience exemplifies the conflicted reputation of health travel: something to be taken seriously and bemusingly dismissed. Does traveling for health produce real results? Or is it just a vacation with a better name? Examining the history of “Change of Air” travel—a practice adopted by the medical field and then the leisure industry, with participants ranging from ailing consumptives to white, well-to-do middle- and upper-class, vaguely nervous individuals—reveals the roots of these paradoxical cultural associations.  

The Problem of Leisure 

Americans have a vexed relationship with traveling. On one hand, vacationing became popular in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century and served as an important class marker for the growing white middle class. On the other hand, even as middle-class Americans vacationed more, they struggled morally with idleness in a culture emphasizing work ethic and productivity.

Attempting to resolve this tension, proponents of the leisure industry advocated for vacationing through the logic of efficiency. Vacations were presented as “ways of saving labor and optimizing human performance.” Vacations allowed exhausted workers to recover and return to work. As efficient management of workers’ health, vacations became acceptable.  

That rest exists only to make more work possible is evidence of how the U.S. has historically functioned as a “work society,” in which work functions as an economic practice and also as a moral and ethical obligation. Today’s growing anti-work movement imagines radically different ways of relating to work and leisure by recognizing that “naturalized” work values like efficiency, productivity, and work ethic are in fact artificial and socially constructed. In this vein, I hope this essay fosters a greater appreciation for the divestment from work, and embracing rest and leisure today. 

Change of Air as Conspicuous Consumption 

In the beginnings of Change of Air travel, two forms of treatment were prescribed: (1) a “somewhat freeform” version as a “treatment for nervous exhaustion,” and (2) a “regimented climate therapy” that involved a “systematic regulation of the invalid’s daily existence” for those suffering from physiological diseases like “consumption” (tuberculosis).

Practitioners of the regimented Change of Air travel “took a rigidly didactic approach to the most basic therapeutic activities,” such as sea-bathing, which was a “meticulous ‘process’ that demanded extreme caution and planning.” Thalassotherapy, or the “therapeutic influence of marine environments,” also became popular, giving way to the oft-referenced “English seaside cure” at sea resorts in towns like Brighton. In the U.S., mineral springs and the seaside became popular health resort destinations as part of Change of Air travel in the early-to-mid nineteenth century.   

Yet the popularity of the Change of Air travel cannot necessarily be attributed to its efficacy. By the start of the twentieth century, alongside the rise in germ theory, doctors cast doubt on Change of Air travel as a legitimate medical practice. For example, a 1900 British Medical Journal article declares that the “least significant factor in a ‘change of air’ as a remedial means is the air itself.” Despite such debunking, Change of Air travel was not abandoned by all doctors immediately. Even though “environmental remedies failed to cure most diseases,” their hold on turn-of-the-century culture remained strong, in large part due to the tourist and leisure industry’s continued claim to its medical roots.  

As Change of Air travel shifted from a cure for consumptives to one for the “bourgeois stress” of the elite, Change of Air travel became part of conspicuous consumption. As sociologist Thorstein Veblen has famously outlined, the elite reinforce their class status through visible performance of leisure (conspicuous leisure) and the buying and displaying of goods (consumption).

Health travel thus solidifies social standing in the same ways as attending the opera in a box or building a new house on Fifth Avenue. Vacations especially demonstrate the ability to be away from work—or not work at all. Change of Air travel’s commodification as a conspicuously consumed object shifted its cultural reputation away from legitimate medical practice toward that of a superficial performance of leisure.  

In response to the growing demands of commodified health travel, the development of resorts for health and pleasure increased in the second half of the nineteenth century. Popular health resorts relied on the idea that health can be packaged, sold and bought, achieved within a short trip. Such messaging proliferates in turn-of-the-century print culture, from railroad-sponsored brochures to personal travel journals, guidebooks to newspaper advertisements. Together, these documents form a nuanced collage of the history of vacations and provide a glimpse of conspicuous consumption and leisure at play within the period. 

Advertising Leisure 

Scribner’s Magazine offers a snapshot of the leisure industry at this time. The magazine ran from 1887 to 1939 and featured notable writers ranging from Theodore Roosevelt to Edith Wharton, whose texts appeared in print next to illustrations, photographs, and, of course, leisure resort advertisements.

Scribner’s placed an emphasis on selling and buying commodities through a consistent advertisement infrastructure. Issues were full to the brim with ads of all sizes and types. The magazine even featured an entirely separate, multiple-page index dedicated to ads, which itself was occasionally interrupted with an ad’s appearance, like a Tiffany and Co blurb in the January 1913 issue.    

The index had a section titled “Travel—Resorts—Tours,” which regularly featured ads from a travel department called the Where-To-Go Bureau. Where-To-Go was “established to give reliable information to readers of these magazines in travel planning.” It often took up a half page and split into three columns, with one consistently dedicated to Health Resorts.

Typically, this column advertised resorts across the U.S., each making health claims and espousing their comforts—making for ads that sound like a mixture of a medical textbook and travel brochure. For example, Robertson Sanitarium is advertised as a “High class Southern Resort” that provides “water treatment, osteopathy, diet, rest” and “delightful cuisine.”

These ads showcase a diversity of locations and climates, from mineral baths in Michigan to water treatment in Georgia, with resorts coast to coast, in Maine, New York, California, and Seattle. As a whole, the ads target common ailments and emphasize their therapies, contributing to a common discourse of health travel that continues through today. 

Now, let’s look a bit closer at the popular Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan. It held a recurring spot in the Where-To-Go section. In the September 1915 issue, Battle Creek advertises in large font: “Rest two weeks in one.” Beneath, the rest of the ad copy reads: “A week or two of health building at Battle Creek is worth many weeks of formal amusement at the so-called Summer Resort. To the jaded business man, to the woman grown weary of rest and diversion, Battle Creek is the ideal vacation retreat.” 

Battle Creek relies on ideas of efficiency: not only can you rest here, but you will also be able to rest better and faster than at other places. If you can only afford one week, that doesn’t matter—you’ll get two weeks’ worth out of it! Importantly, these advertisements also evoke the language of energy that underwrites efficiency discourse, demonstrating how intertwined leisure can be within the call to work, then rest, so you can work more. 

The ads reveal a few crucial things about health travel more broadly and Change of Air more specifically. First, leisure can be packaged and sold like any other consumer good. Capitalism very much intrudes in leisure. Second, leisure can be marketed as an efficient solution to its opposite: productive work. In this logic, leisure recharges an individual’s “batteries” to get them back to work, fully powered up. Access to rest is granted, but through the emphasis of work values.

Last, leisure can also be marketed as health travel, explicitly or implicitly, through health benefit references. Leisure is again made to fit within the U.S. turn-of-the-century work society, framed as having a multitasking function—it achieves pleasure but can also lead to better health and self-improvement.  

Leisure and Environment Today 

The photo included at the top of this essay evokes a scene of my own lakeside trip: my friends and I enjoying the water, weather, and sunset. The location is Lake Petenwell, Wisconsin’s second largest lake, covering approximately 23,000 acres, artificially constructed by a hydroelectric dam on the Wisconsin River.

Much like the health resorts, this “man-made” lake holds a paradoxical status as something of the environment but also something shaped by the human-centered quest for power and production, as well as recreation and leisure in nature. This complicated status is made visible in a telling way: the lake has become home to blue-green algae, caused by run-off from nearby farms and lawns. By September of 2024, the number of algae reports had already surpassed prior years. A local property website even dedicates an FAQ to algae and how it impacts the properties in the area.  

This closing example demonstrates the problem of how leisure and environment alike are coopted within the machinations of capitalism. Understanding the roots of cultural behaviors and attitudes about vacationing allows vacationers of all types to better make sense of our current moment—in which one might be writing a dissertation about leisure, and then find themself in a literal place that so clearly illustrates the stakes and reality of the U.S. culture and society they have been studying.  

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Alexis Schmidt is a Ph.D. candidate of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She studies turn-of-the-century U.S. literature, and her research interests are work, energy, and exhaustion. Her dissertation is tentatively titled “American Exhaustion: Energy, Bodies, and Literature in the Progressive Era.” Her scholarship has appeared in the Edith Wharton Review and is forthcoming in Studies in American Naturalism and Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life. Contact. 

Featured image: Summer sunset over Lake Petenwell. Photo by Ronnica Rothe, 2013.