Bílina’s present-day genius loci is marked by coal mining and the forcible transformation of what was originally a spa town into a mining and industrial town. However, Bílina has a rich spa history associated with the local healing water springs and the Lobkowicz family, who ran both the spa and the bottling plant.
The mineral water springs were also a source of knowledge about the Earth's interior at a time when the natural sciences began to develop in the 18th century, which later branched out into different directions such as geology, physics and chemistry. Therefore, Balneology, or the science of spas, is not merely a kind of branch of medicine, or even of tourism and recreation, but a comprehensive science that emerged hand in hand with our understanding of the Earth.
Bílina can be described as the birthplace of this discipline, roughly at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. The men who primarily deserve the credit for the development of balneology as a comprehensive study of springs, their origins, composition and healing effects, are Franz Ambrosius Reuss and his son August Emanuel von Reuss. However, they followed up on a long tradition since the foundation of the spa in the 17th century (the Lobkowicz family set up the first spring in 1664.) In 1717 Friedrich Hoffmann, the physician to the King of Prussia, described the bitter water here as having the same composition as Epsom salts from England, sources of which had been exhausted, and thus the local springs became a world-famous source of the magnesium sulphate salts so widely used in medicine.
The Bílinská kyselka Museum offers visitors a picture of the former colonnades, where high politics met with science and philosophy – a picture that nowadays belongs entirely to the spirit of the 19th century, from which modern-day science was to be born.
Chlupáč, I., Budil, I.; Tajemné hlubiny času. Academia, Praha 2006. s. 159-164.
Hurník, S.: Zavátá minulost Mostecka. Regionální museum v Mostě 2001. s. 3-8.
Regionální muzeum v Teplicích: Reussové z Bíliny. Památce velkých přírodovědců. Teplice 2001.
