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.

    19/60 (page 19)
    SECTION III. THE VARIOUS KINDS OF BATHS. Having conclusively proved that bathing is necessary to health, and having shown that this fact, which seems now- adays so palpable, has really only been accepted in its entirety within quite a comparatively recent period, we will proceed to describe the different baths that are at present accepted by sanitary and medical authorities as most useful to establish a perfect condition of health, or most eflBcacious to combat various states of ill-health. Baths have been classified in many ways, but the broadest practical division is that into simple or non- medicated baths on the one hand, and medicated on the other. The term medicated is used in contradistinction to medical, and is intended to imply the addition of some actual drug to the bath. Thus the ordinary hot-air or Turkish bath may be termed a medical bath, seeing that it is constantly used for medical purposes; so also is the electric bath, but neither of these is medicated in the sense that a sulphur or an alkaline or an acid bath is. At the Argyll Baths this distinction into simple and medicated baths is used to guide the distribution of the establishment, a separate department being devoted to each. (There is also of course a separate department for ladies.) Each of these two classes of baths, simple and medicated, fall into three divisions, namely : 1. Liquid; 2. Vapour; and 3. Air. It will be, then, in this order that they will be considered. It may be mentioned that the electric