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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    «ome o£ the most loathsome diseases dirt had engendered. It prevented their spread to Europe when Greeks and Asiatics first came into contact, and secured immunity from diseases we have since had bequeathed to us from centuries of dirt and darkness. This is no fiction of the imagination. Infectious diseases such as measles, smallpox, scarlet fever, and others which, have been classified as zymotic, were abso- lutely unknown to the Arabians, the Greeks, and the Romans. Researches prove that they all originated nearly at one and the same period, i. e. about the end of tbe fifth, century, and that their origin is clearly coeval with the disuse of the various thermal baths; and say what we will of the luxury which characterised the bathing of the ancients, there is no doubt that in that custom lay the secret of their great security from disease. And what followed when once the zymotic diseases ■originated ? The accounts given by Hecker of the epi- demics o£ the Middle Ages, by De Foe of the Great Plague of London, or the revelations in Boccaccio's history of the Black Death, all tell their sickening tale of the effects of dirt. The Mosaic laws, the prophet Elijah's command, Wash and be clean, even the reassertion of the same laws in the New Testament, were forgotten or misconstrued, and the odour of sanctity in the days of the early Christian hermits and saints was anything but fragrant. Just as Eastern nations had made cleanliness a part of their religion, so it really seems that the Western nations made filth a sign of sanctity. St. Jerome specially commended an Egyptian hermit who only combed his hair on Easter Sunday and never washed his clothes at all, but let them fall to pieces by rottenness. St. Anthony, it is stated, never washed his feet at all. As to one of our own ecclesiastical worthies, we learn that, much to the delight of all the clergy, the body of St. Thomas a Becket was, on the removal of the horsehair shirt at his death, found to be literally boiling with vermin. History indeed epeaks at length of the inevitable consequences of this