Baths and bathing : a description of all the various kinds of baths, both simple and medicated, administered at the Argyll Baths (established 1817) : 10A, Argyll Place, Regent Street, W. (near Oxford Circus), and 5, New Broad Street, City, E.C. (near the North London Railway station).

Date:
[1885]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Baths and bathing : a description of all the various kinds of baths, both simple and medicated, administered at the Argyll Baths (established 1817) : 10A, Argyll Place, Regent Street, W. (near Oxford Circus), and 5, New Broad Street, City, E.C. (near the North London Railway station). Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    imitatious of tlie modern hot-air bath, had still the same aim, viz. the relief of the system by stimulating the restorative functions of the skin. That they were effective may be judged from their reputation as a sovereign cure for rheumatism and other aches and pains. It is said that some of these sweating houses still exist in Ireland, but they are rapidly dying out since the introduction of the more recent varieties of baths. Further from home we find the principle of the hot-air bath known and practised in various ways from very early times by the Russians, Finns, Japanese, Americans, and, the aborigines of different countries. Amongst the ancient Germans, on the contrary, it is asserted by Tacitus and other writers that there was very little warm or hot-air bathing, and little by little throughout the other nations of Europe, wherever the Germans dominated, the various medicinal baths (other than the cold river bath) gradually began to be neglected, until finally they were very little used, if at all. The Disuse of the Bath and its Results. The disuse of the bath became nearly general all over Europe when the luxurious nations of the South decayed. If no one had been the worse for it, we should not be doing much service by drawing attention to this decline of an institution which had played so great a part in the lives of those great nations who have left us the products of a civilisation the highest the world had then seen. But Europe xuas the worse for it and its effects fell not only upon the third and fourth generations, but have extended even to our own time. We have not touched upon the question whether Moses, by his religious ordi- nances with regard to bathing, had in view the prevention or more speedy cure of leprosy and other skin diseases so prevalent in the East; certain it is, however, that the thorough cleansing of the skin prevented the ravages of