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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    slighter ones in everyday life, the nerves of the skin being braced into tolerance. Obesity, especially that arising from an inactive and sedentary mode of life, is especially amenable to a course of these baths and for the obvious reason that they produce all the needful tissue-waste that ordinarily accompanies exercise ; and further without the fatigue that exercise involves. A generally sluggish habit of body which often exists without stoutness yields for similar reasons, all the vital processes being accelerated and excited to fuller action. The general lethargy of system which accompanies inactivity of the liver in the case of old Indians and long- standing residents in similar tropical climates yields most satisfactorily to a long-continued but gentle course of these baths. Dr. Ringer particularly notes this and adds a caution against the too vigorous application of the bath, that is, against exposure to too high a temperature in the hot process, and too low a temperature in the cold process ; and this is a caution which may well be pondered over by many habitues of Turkish baths, who get into the habit of thinking that the greater the temperature they can expose themselves to the greater will be the benefit derived. Gout and rheumatism are two diseases for whose results these baths are very often almost a specific ; and when one considers the vast number of forms in which gout and rheumatism show themselves, and the innumerable ailments that are directly ascribable to them, one can easily under- stand what a range of cases occur in which relief can thus be obtained. Pains in the various joints, of the muscles, and of the different viscera often disappear like magic under a course of these baths; and although in long-standing cases the effect may not be quite so instantaneous and striking, yet to quote again Dr. Ringer's ' Handbook of Thera- peutics,' by diminishing the frequency and severity of the relapses, and by removing the pervading sensation of