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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    from a small brush up to a plate of several square feet, but it is with these latter that the best effects seem to be produced. To put the point more popularly. The bather sits immersed in a warm bath, at the head and foot of which are two large metal plates, covered with a wooden trellis so that the body of the bather and the plates may not come into contact. When the current passes between the broad surface of the plates, it traverses the body of the bather in a broad stream, and he can feel every part of him subjected to the influence of this current that lies between the two broad plates. The difference between this and the ordinary clinical method is evident. With the latter contact is made with the body at definite points, and the electricity selects the natural electrical nerve and muscle ways, and passes along these—a thing which for many therapeutic purposes is the most desirable. But with the electric bath there is a broad current flowing, the outline of which can be felt, and any part of the body brought into the current receives the stream of electricity through it. Thus the finger or the arm can be as it were dipped into the stream of elec- tricity ; and when the bather is seated in the usual position in which the bath is taken, the whole body is involved in this stream of electricity, and is traversed by it. Every electric bath-room has in it other rheophores, as brushes, sponges, &c., besides the broad plates just men- tioned, which former can be, if medically ordered, used, in the way generally employed, to special nerves and parti- cular groups of muscles ; but it is the electric bath when used with the broad plates in this novel method that has proved so efficient. Why this should be so it would seem difficult to say, but the fact must be judged rather by practical results than by theoretical considerations. Wlien some time since the electric bath first came prominently under their notice, the management of the Argyll Baths had one fitted up at each of their establishments, add