The ice bath is 5,000 years old. Nobody told the podcasters.

So, I wanted to know where the ice bath actually came from (not the Huberman protocol) the actual thing itself. Because there's a small industry of people getting into freezing water on purpose these days, and Amazon sold 90,000 of those portable tubs in a single month back in 2023, and none of that happens without someone starting it.

That someone, more or less, is Wim Hof. In 1995 he lost his wife to suicide, and grief-stricken, started immersing himself in the canals near Amsterdam, because the cold quieted his mind in a way nothing else did. He kept going too, climbed Kilimanjaro in shorts, ran a half marathon above the Arctic Circle barefoot, stood in a container of ice for 112 minutes. Scientists at Radboud University studied him in 2011 and found he could voluntarily influence his autonomic nervous system, something medicine had assumed was impossible. Worth saying though, it was a study of one very unusual man who'd spent decades training under extreme conditions, and that detail got lost somewhere on the way to Netflix and then the Goop Lab and then Huberman's podcast.

Turns out the claims Hof's whole thing rides on, immune system, mood, inflammation, recovery, are basically identical to claims made almost two hundred years earlier, just delivered via podcast this time instead of patient testimonials.

Because there was an Austrian peasant farmer called Vincenz Priessnitz doing this exact thing in 1822. In 1816 a horse kicked him in the face and a cart crushed his chest, doctors declared him crippled for life, and he'd spent time watching a deer repeatedly plunge an injured leg into a cold mountain stream. So he pressed a wooden chair against his abdomen, manually realigned his own broken ribs, wrapped himself in cold wet compresses, and recovered within a year. His neighbours thought it was a miracle. He decided it was the water, opened a clinic in Gräfenberg with no medical training and no case records, just testimonials, and was treating 1,600 patients a year within two decades, including royalty. The claims expanded to cover pretty much everything: gout, rheumatism, tuberculosis, melancholy, indigestion. Medical bodies sued him for being a charlatan and he got acquitted, because technically he wasn't practising medicine, he was just putting people in water.

Here's the bit that actually derailed me for a while though. Cold water enthusiasm got absorbed into Victorian psychiatric hospitals not long after, on the logic that mania is an overheated brain and cold water cools things down, so cold water cures madness. Patients submerged for hours, wrapped in freezing wet sheets, blasted with cold hoses. There was a real treatment called the Bath of Surprise, dropping an agitated patient into ice cold water without warning because the shock itself was deemed therapeutic. Considered an improvement on the straitjacket at the time.

Priessnitz wasn't even first though, not by a long way. A Scottish physician named James Currie was dunking fever patients in cold water in Liverpool back in 1797 and actually keeping records, which might make his the first proper scientific study on cold water immersion. He noticed it acts as a central nervous system stimulant. Methods spread across Europe, dedicated cold water clinics opened across Britain within decades, Charles Dickens visited one, so did Tennyson.

And even that's nowhere near the start. The Edwin Smith Papyrus, one of the oldest medical documents ever found, records Egyptians using cold water to treat injuries around 3,500 BCE. Hippocrates was prescribing cold baths for fever a few thousand years after that, not as a wellness ritual, as actual medicine, on logic that was wrong in an interesting way: fever is hot, cold is the opposite, therefore apply cold. Humoral theory, balancing the elements. Worked well enough, by accident, to stick around for millennia.

The actual modern research, when it eventually showed up, was built almost entirely on one scenario: athletes recovering between training sessions. Not morning routines or chronic stress or the general population, just post-exercise recovery in professional sport, specifically. That gap between what's been studied and what gets claimed has existed for as long as someone's been standing in cold water insisting it fixes everything.

The deer probably healed on its own. Priessnitz just happened to be watching, and two hundred years later, Steven Bartlett's sat in a chest freezer at 5am because of it.