The hydropathic encyclopedia : a system of hydropathy and hygiene in eight parts ... designed as a guide to families and students, and a text-book for physicians / by R. T. Trall.

  • Trall, R. T. (Russell Thacher), 1812-1877.
Date:
[1855]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The hydropathic encyclopedia : a system of hydropathy and hygiene in eight parts ... designed as a guide to families and students, and a text-book for physicians / by R. T. Trall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

    61/1004 (page 43)
    Mi.dicated Baths.—A brief notice in this place of the various methods of impure bathing, invented by superstitious ignoramuses and learned JEsculapians, may serve a better'purpose than mere amuse- ment for the reader. A medicated bath, in the popular medical sense, is water or hot air charged with some drug or extraneous ingredient. In ancient times medicinal baths of oil, oil and water, milk, milk and wine, and even of blood, were employed. More recently, baths made of tho steepings of the husks and other refuse matters of grapes, and of olives, after the expression of their juice and oil, have been employed; and still later gelatine, dissolved in water, has been recommended by physicians, prob- ably as a nutrition;- bath ! Mud baths or earth baths have been employed in Germany, France, Italy, una other places. The process of a mud bath is technically called Mutation. A kind of artificial illutament—presuming mud to be the natural one—for anointing the body, was made of oil and the perspira- ble maUer suaped off the skins of the Greek athletae. Doubtless it possessed as much virtue as any of the all-healing ointments of the present day. Warm dung baths are not unknown among medical prescriptions on tho continent of Europe. Bees-eqgs baths, made of wax, honey, and the excrement <.t oees, have been among the acknowledged outward medicaments, and proba bly have worked their due proportion of wonderful cures. The Sand bath, called arenation, is known to many Eastern civilized and semi-civilized nations. The body is covered up with the warm sand and exuvial matters on the sea shore, so as to produce active sweating. Other substances, as earth and sulphur, salt and grain, have been used for arenation. Insolation baths have enjoyed a high reputation. The body is wrapped up in the hide of an animal, or in leather, and then exposed to the heat of the sun until sweating takes place. Occasionally tho body is turned so as to expose all sides to the sun about equally, not very unlike the operation of roasting a goose on a spit before tho fire. The process is followed by washing in alum or sulphur water. Some- times the patient is laid on a bed of wormwood, chamomile, sage, pennyroyal, or other herbs. Epithems, poultices, and fomentations, which are really local baths, have been employed extensively both in ancient and modern times. Bags of heated sand, ashes, salt, oats, barley, etc., have each been supposed to possess peculiar virtues; while carrots, hard soap, basswood roots, P'lxsced, Indian meal, broad and milk, yolk of eggs, scraped