Strange things happen just before dawn in hotel beds all over Bad Wörishofen, a tranquil German spa town (pop. 15,000) in the rolling foothills of the Bavarian Alps, 80 km west of Munich. Therapists, dressed in white, sneak into the rooms and wrap the legs of slumbering guests in cold, wet towels. It's a rude awakening, certainly, but they've traveled to this self-described "cradle of wellness" just to experience it. These willing victims are the latest devotees of the water treatments of a 19th century parish priest named Sebastian Kneipp, who claimed to have rid himself of tuberculosis as a student by taking frequent dips in the icy Danube River. In 1855 he treated his first patients in Bad Wörishofen at the bathhouse of a Dominican convent where he was father confessor. Over the next 15 years, ever greater numbers of men and women gathered in the meadows outside Bad Wörishofen to walk barefoot in the morning dew or wade in muddy ponds up to their knees. Indoors, visitors were pummeled by jets of icy water directed from about 3 m away, meant to loosen stiff joints and stimulate circulation. The treatment is virtually the same today — and while at first you may feel like screaming and running away from the high-pressure hoses, you soon feel the beneficial effects as tense muscles relax, blood circulation improves, and spirits soar.

As news of Kneipp's near-miraculous water cures spread from the sleepy Bavarian farming town to surrounding areas, people flocked to try out his hydrotherapies. The son of a weaver, he became famous for using water to alleviate various ailments: alternating hot and cold baths to boost a sluggish metabolism, for instance, and hot compresses applied to the abdomen to counter colics and inflammations of the bladder. Before he died at 76 in 1897, Kneipp had spelled out his natural-remedy beliefs in four books, and several doctors had moved to Bad Wörishofen to practice what he had preached from a specially built outdoor pulpit.

A century later, neither the humble bathhouse where Kneipp saw his first patient, nor the austere treatment rooms in the sanatorium he moved to in 1891, are in use. But his memory is kept alive all over town, not only by a large assortment of Kneipp busts, statues and pictures — "he's everywhere and everything," says the town's tourism manager, Alexander von Hohenegg — but also at the 12 sanatoriums and 168 pensions and hotels that stand cheek by jowl in the winding, tree-studded streets, offering hydrotherapy and other treatments to a never-ending stream of visitors. A healthy place, but in the early '90s, the wellness industry in Bad Wörishofen hit hard times. Cuts in German health-care funding caused the number of guests taking insurance-paid four- to six-week cures in the town to drop drastically; between 1991 and 1999, the annual number of overnight stays dropped from 1.4 million to about 800,000. To fill the gap with visitors who pay for themselves — and to grab a bigger share of the estimated 360 billion Germans spend on wellness each year — Von Hohenegg decided the spa town needed to step up its marketing efforts. So it began to offer a variety of New Age therapies of which the ascetic Kneipp might not have approved: Asian forms of alternative healing such as Ayurveda and Reiki, and La Stone Therapy, in which the body is treated with heated lava rocks and cold marble stones. Also helping to lure back the health hunters is the town's new star attraction, the Therme Bad Wörishofen, a 328 million, 5,000-sq-m complex with eight thermal baths and a retractable 2,500-sq-m glass cupola. "We simply had to go with the times," says Von Hohenegg. It's paying off. By the end of this year, the number of overnight stays will likely reach 900,000. Most hotels offer short-stay, all-inclusive packages — with or without medical check-ups — from around 3100 to more than 31,000 a night.

Don't expect wild nightlife or trendy restaurants in Kneipp's former parish; it is a town of stuccoed houses, quiet squares and quaint, onion-shaped church roofs. The most happening places in town are the 16 "water-treading" pools where local youngsters and visitors let their hair down by rolling up their trouser legs and wading to their heart's content. And there's nothing like sipping fragrant herbal tea in one of the plush-and-velvet cafés to help you forget about the hectic pace of modern life. But Bad Wörishofen never loses sight of who's behind all this healthiness: Kneipp is even taught in kindergarten. In a nursery school called Gartenstadt, kids learn about arm and foot baths, meditation and the other elements of the priest's health regimen. "These are things you use your whole life," intones headmistress Karla Schübel. Giggly Vera Nebel, 5, is a Kneipp fan: "He's the man," she yells, jumping up and down in front of the priest's portrait, "who knows everything about what you need to do to feel good!" In Bad Wörishofen, at least, Kneipp and his holistic teachings have achieved a kind of eternal youth.