‘I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.’
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Scrolling through Instagram and being inundated with adverts for helmets that alleviate depression and miniature pressure washers to clean the aural canal and improve hearing, it is hard not to identify with the narrator of the late Victorian comic novella Three Men in a Boat. This light-hearted tale concerns a trio of 19th-century hypochondriacs who take a boating and camping holiday on the upper reaches of the Thames to cure ill-health ‘brought on by overwork’.
Ever since reading this book, I have understood that my natural inclination to laziness is nothing other than my body’s natural defences protecting my delicate health. The problem with health-protecting idleness is that it gives you plenty of time to roam aimlessly across the vast steppes of the internet being made aware of symptoms you never knew you displayed, betokening ailments you had no idea existed.
In the book, the narrator consults a medical lexicon for ways to treat hay fever, and then ‘in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves and began to indolently study diseases’. The jackbooted march of progress means that I no longer need to go to a library to find an illness; I can terrify myself in the comfort of my own home by having a consultation with Dr Google.
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Unsurprisingly, I view all change, even change for the better, with great suspicion and circumspection. But progress has its upsides, one of which is the presence of the Emory Hotel on Knightsbridge. The Emory is the latest offering from the people who brought you the Connaught, Claridge’s and the Berkeley; it is also the best, and not just for its penthouse cigar shop with panoramic views of London. Buried deep in the bowels of the hotel is the wonderful Dr Mark Mikhail of the hotel’s Surrenne spa.
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Any decent hotel can rustle up a physician (although Travelodge might be pushing it), and of course doctors are the stars of medical spas. But if you want to mix luxury suite-only accommodation across the road from Hyde Park a couple of minutes from Harrods with a little light leisure medicine, there is nothing to beat a stay at the Emory.
As well as offering a veritable candy store of health boosters, I am known for my partiality to glutathione shots. Dr Mark (who looks like he is moonlighting from a day job as a Loro Piana model) supervises use of the hotel’s hyperbaric chamber. ‘Chamber’ is a tiny bit of poetic licence – I would describe it as looking like a high-tech cigar tube about the dimensions of an XXL coffin – but you will agree that ‘hyperbaric coffin’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
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As far as I can gather, the principle of the hyperbaric chamber is that one is taken to a depth of, say, 10 or 20 metres below the waves (not in the hotel’s delightful pool, you understand – these are notional metres) and in this pressurised environment your system is flooded with oxygen that seems to have restorative properties second only to those of the Philosopher’s stone.
‘Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is a well-established treatment for a wide range of conditions,’ the Emory explains, ‘including infections, decompression sickness and injuries.’ While I am unlikely to get a case of the bends on Knightsbridge, ‘infections’ and ‘injuries’ cover a lot of ground and probably tens of thousands of pages of Dr Google. I have even heard anecdotally that association footballers sleep in them so they are match fit every morning, no matter how many nightclubs they may have visited before crawling to their hyperbaric beds.
And if it is good enough for footballers… I clamber in and Dr Mark seals the glass panel, leaving me feeling like I am lying in those things in which long-distance space travellers are put into suspended animation. As it gets a bit chilly at 20 metres below sea level, Dr Mark has thoughtfully given me a couple of cashmere plaids (I forget to check whether they were Loro Piana). There is the minor discomfort of feeling like someone is trying to burst your ear drum with a screwdriver (perhaps I shouldn’t have turned my nose up at the aural canal cleaner on Instagram), but after that it is just a matter of lying there with an oxygen mask, taking glorious refreshing gulps of oxygen. After an hour or so you are brought back up to sea level and the glass panel is unfastened and accompanied by a gratifying billow of condensational mist.
While not exactly ready for the Premier League, just two visits (during the second of which I slept if not like a baby, then certainly a footballer) genuinely appeared to accelerate healing of a mysterious injury to my foot – particularly dispiriting, as it had been restricting my choice of footwear. I can’t recommend it highly enough. There is just one slight improvement I would humbly suggest – namely that the hyperbaric chamber be moved into the cigar shop.
This feature first appeared in Spear’s Magazine Issue 93. Click here to subscribe
