When visitors go to the spa in the newly refurbished Bedford Springs Resort, they'll be able to drink and bathe in treated water from a newly discovered spring.

But the seven traditional springs that once drew thousands to the Bedford County resort in its 19th-century heyday -- including three that are saturated with iron, sulfur and magnesium -- will be limited to guided educational tours, says spa director Veronique Paquet.

That symbolizes the biggest change that has taken place at the mineral spring spas that are sprinkled today throughout the mountainous regions of the nation, from Saratoga Springs in upstate New York to The Greenbrier in West Virginia to Calistoga Springs in California.

While the spas still advertise relaxation, recreation and cool mountain air, they put much less emphasis on their mineral water, even if they happen to be blessed with heated springs bubbling up from deep beneath the earth.

"It's not necessarily the mineral waters that are the draw now," said Frank Chapelle, a chemical hydrogeologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and the author of "Wellsprings," a 2005 book on the history of bottled mineral water.

"Now it's the aromatherapies and the foot massages and the mud pastes which are the draw, which I find amusing because I hate that kind of stuff," he said.

It was a much different story 150 years ago.

In the mid-1800s, mineral spring spas were the places for wealthy Americans to go during the humid summer months, particularly in Virginia, what is now West Virginia, Pennsylvania and upstate New York.

Patrons often spent the entire summer traveling from one spa to another in a circuit prescribed by their physicians, Dr. Chapelle said, and the ones who ran out of money along the way even imparted a phrase to our language -- they were described as being "down to their last resort."

The water that bubbled to the surface in these locales often gave off the rotten-egg aroma of sulfur, or was red with iron deposits, or was bracingly alkaline.

Urged on by the doctors of the era, the moneyed classes drank copious amounts of the mineral water, bathed in it hot and cold, wrapped themselves in sheets that were saturated with it, and even stood under torrents of it cascading from artificial waterfalls.

At White Sulphur Springs, the site of today's Greenbrier resort, the resident physician in the 1800s recommended that newcomers consume four to eight glasses of sulfur water a day, and work up to 10 to 12 glasses daily after a couple of weeks, said The Greenbrier's resident historian, Robert Conte.

This ritual, Dr. Conte said wryly, had a noticeable "cathartic effect" on guests' digestive systems.

There was even a branch of medicine known as hydropathy, and its practitioners were not shy about their claims. In an 1847 tome called "The Water Cure Manual," water baths were advocated for everything from earache, toothache, croup and dyspepsia to cholera, smallpox, pneumonia, heart disease and cancer, wrote Harry Weiss and Howard Kemble in "The Great American Water-Cure Craze."

"When people ask me what scientific proof there is about the benefits of mineral water," Dr. Conte said, "my only answer is: That's a 20th-century question." In articles written by the resort's 19th-century physician, Dr. John Moorman, "he backs up his claims [about health benefits] with testimonials from patrons, and that was proof in those days. They used anecdotal evidence."

Today, mineral spring spas still try to pull in affluent customers, but they don't tend to promote drinking the mineral water, and bathing in it has become part of a larger program of skin treatments and pampering.

At Bedford Springs, Ms. Paquet said, the spring water being used at the spa has very few minerals in it. Guests will be invited to go through a 45-minute regimen of drinking some of the water, inhaling its heated vapors, then sitting in warm, jetted water at 103 degrees before soaking in a cool bath at 68 degrees.

"It's all designed to put people's muscles in a state of neutral relaxation," she said.

In a similar way, Dr. Conte said, The Greenbrier offers guests the chance to bathe in mineral water for 12 minutes, then go through a "Scotch Spray -- essentially they shoot two fire hoses up and down your back" -- a "Swiss Shower" with 18 high-pressure nozzles, and then a steam bath or massage.

"We used to say we had 'treatments,' " Dr. Conte said. "Now we call them 'experiences.' "

Even though modern medicine has cooled in its enthusiasm for mineral water, some of the therapies of the 1800s had a scientific underpinning, Dr. Chapelle said.

Rain water is naturally acidic, he said, but when it percolates down through limestone beds, it picks up calcium sodium bicarbonate and bubbles back up as an alkaline spring.

Doctors in the 19th century would prescribe drinking this water for people who had what today would be called acid reflux, he said, and it worked. "It had the same effect as chewing a couple Tums."

In a similar way, one famous source of water in Saratoga known as Congress Springs was loaded with iodine and was effectively prescribed for people who had the common problem of goiters, he said.

Many of the spas, including Saratoga Springs and White Sulphur Springs, began to bottle their mineral water and sell it, a business that continued until World War II.

One of the ironies of today's lucrative bottled-water market, Dr. Chapelle said, is that Americans want as little mineral content in their water as possible, while Europeans feel the opposite way.

"The joke is that Europeans drink water for what it contains, while Americans drink water for what it does not contain," he wrote in "Wellsprings."

When it comes to external use, most doctors today consider mineral water treatments to be part of alternative medicine.

There is one group, however, that has tried to bring some scientific rigor to the subject.

Dr. Shaul Sukenik and his colleagues at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel have carried out several studies at spas near the Dead Sea, which has one of the highest mineral contents in the world.

Dr. Sukenik's group found significant improvement lasting a few months in symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis patients who underwent treatments in 95-degree Dead Sea water, and also found heated mineral water had better short-term results in low-back-pain patients than heated tap water.

The Dead Sea water also helped patients with psoriatic arthritis, which includes skin and nail problems, the group found, but some of that was attributed to the strong sunlight in the surrounding desert.

Brian Hagen, program director at the UPMC Center for Sports Medicine on the South Side, said water therapy is a frequent part of the treatment for injured athletes and others at the facility.

But aside from slightly chlorinating its water and heating it in the pool and whirlpool baths, the center is just using water out of the tap, he said.

The main benefit of aquatic therapy, Dr. Hagen said, is that it allows people with injuries to start exercising earlier than otherwise because the pool's buoyancy takes pressure off their joints.

Warm water also increases circulation and range of motion, he added.

Heated water is also an attraction at many mineral springs spas, including The Homestead in Hot Springs, Va.; Warm Springs, Ga.; Hot Springs, Ark.; and Calistoga Springs, Calif.

"I'll tell you a true story about Calistoga Springs," Dr. Chapelle said. "The man who started the resort wanted to make it the Saratoga Springs of the West, but one night when he was drunk, he said, 'I'm gonna make this the Calistoga of Sarafornia,' and that's how it got its name."

While the owners of the 19th-century resorts emphasized the medicinal value of their springs, they also knew there were many other factors that drew people to the spas.

In the South, the mountain resorts were a way to escape the coastal cities in the summer -- and not just to get away from the heat and humidity, said The Greenbrier's Dr. Conte.

The peak period for the resorts coincided with the decades when cholera and yellow fever epidemics were a major threat in swampy cities such as Charleston, S.C., and New Orleans.

The other attraction was that wealthy people could congregate with each other, said Charlene Marie Boyer Lewis, a Kalamazoo College professor who did her doctoral dissertation on the spas in Virginia and West Virginia.

"The guise for going was health," she said, "but women would change their dresses three and four times a day, ride around in carriages and wear lots of jewelry."

"And," Dr. Lewis added, "for these three months of every year you had the best of your society there, which means you had the people you wanted your sons or daughters to marry. So these places become very infused with romance.

"There were picnics in the woods, walks to waterfalls and horseback rides into mountains and caves -- and I'll let you interpret the meaning of that -- and then evenings devoted to flirting and finding a mate.

"And that was the goal, to leave the resort with an engagement and a wedding plan."

The Civil War interrupted the success of the spas, she said, and as the railroads developed, the sites that weren't near a line diminished in popularity. Many of the famous "Virginia springs" are now overgrown by woods, "and you can't even tell a resort was once there."

There is one other major difference between today's spas and their predecessors.

Where many men and women hope to lose some weight when they go to the modern spas, the goal was just the opposite in the 1800s.

The average woman summering at the springs in the mid-1800s was 5 feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds. Her hope was that the various treatments would get her up to about 120 pounds before she returned home in the fall.

"Plump and healthy went together almost all of the time in those days," Dr. Lewis said.