IN one of the more harrowing scenes from the 2009 film "Creation", which concerns the death in Malvern of Charles Darwin's beloved daughter, Annie, the ailing girl is shown being literally deluged by torrents of water from a huge tank, in a vain bid to cure her.

Annie officially died of "bilious fever with typhoid character", and the child, who was Darwin's favourite, is buried in Great Malvern Priory churchyard.

Modern consensus favours tuberculosis as Annie's likely nemesis; and Dr Gully's water cure, which she endured so bravely, seems to have been an unnecessary and ineffectual cruelty: serving no purpose except to hasten the ten year old's death .

But Annie's famous father was himself a strong believer in the water cure which, in the mid-Victorian period, brought the well-heeled rich and famous to Malvern.

Darwin held that the cure had actually helped him, and other luminaries of the age, including the poet Lord Tennyson and the founder of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale, were also advocates, having tried the water cure themselves.

In a letter of 1860, Florence Nightingale said: "I should not be here were it not for Malvern. In August 1857, after my work at the Royal Sanitary Commission, and after four weeks of anxiety and exertion, I was told that my life was not worth 24 hours purchase – and I knew it too. I owe three years of life to the water-cure at Malvern."

This extraordinary claim will surely be examined during a talk at Malvern's Coach House Theatre, on September 25 from 3pm, when Dr John Harcup will give a talk on "Florence Nightingale and the Malvern Cold Water Cure."

But what was the cure, and how was it supposed to work?

In 1846, its chief exponent of the day, James Manby Gully, published a book called "The Water Cure in Chronic Disease".

It is a wordy and discursive tome, written in a style which reveals learning - which one might expect from a man who studied medicine at Edinburgh and Paris - but it contains little eloquence.

In short, the cure - also called "hydropathy" - was a controlled shock to the system.

It attempted to get the vascular system - the blood vessels - working efficiently and so overcome a whole host of chronic illnesses, from gout to bronchitis and tuberculosis.

The "Creation" scenes may have been slightly exaggerated, because it seems as if the favoured way of drenching patients was to simply hurl buckets of water over them instead. The real-life Annie Darwin may not have been asked to stand trembling, wrapped only in wet sheets, beneath an ominous wooden water tank.

The wet sheets were real enough, however. Patients were woken at dawn to be wrapped in wet sheets, before the inevitable drenching sessions. They were also required to walk five miles before breakfast, to partake of the waters from Malvern's famous wells.

Afternoons were spent in baths, probably containing cold water.

Alcohol was not allowed and only a plain diet would be served throughout.

Given the austere regime, is it any surprise that so many patients appeared to be cured so quickly?

Gully, who had a business partner called James Wilson, opened his Malvern clinic, in 1842, at Holyrood and Tudor House on the Worcester Road, and the buildings are still there.

Dr Gully eventually moved on, and in later life he developed an interest in spiritualism.

Given the illustrious names that passed through his Malvern clinic, if there are such things as ghosts, what conversations may still be overheard from an time of both great faith and experimentation, when it seemed for a while as if Dr Gully's remedy was indeed a true miracle of his age?

Tickets for Dr Harcup's talk at The Coach House Theatre are available now on, 01684 892277.