Bathing : how to do it, when to do it, and where to do it / by Edgar Sheppard.

  • Sheppard, Edgar, 1819-1897.
Date:
1866
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Bathing : how to do it, when to do it, and where to do it / by Edgar Sheppard. 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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    son. Sir Joliu Fife, Messrs. Erasmus Wilson and Moore, with many others, are unanimous on this point, and have placed on record remarkable illustrative cases. Dr. Lockhart Robertson, the medical superintendent of the Sussex Asylum, in a letter to Mr. Urquhart, says :— “ When you were at Hayward’s Heath the other day I showed you a patient, M. W—, who was admitted here on the 23rd of February, 1863, apparently in a state of confirmed dementia, unable even to tell his name; restless and destruc- tive. He was much reduced in health, and there was dropsy of the lower limbs, with albuminous urine of a marked character. The patient gradually got worse, and after he had been a month in the asylum I sent him to the bath almost as a forlorn hope. The result of a month’s treatment of the bath, twice a week, was that the dropsy disappeared, that no trace of albumen is now to be found in the urine, and that the man is apparently convalescent. You will remember seeing him here at his work as a carpenter.” * And since this is the record of an accomplished physician to au asylum for the insane, we may here at once allude to the beneficial effects which are likely to accrue, and have already accrued, from thermal agency in the treatment of mental disease. Ireland was that part of the United Kingdom where the bath first found a home through the instrumentality of Mr. Urquhart and Dr. Barter; where it has been received with less disfavour and prejudice than in England, and where its results in the treatment of insanity are best knoAvn. It has been introduced Avith marked success in many of the Irish county asylums. Dr. Power, the resident physician to the Cork Asylum, Avas good enough to shoAV us his Turkish bath two years ago, and communicated to us his great satisfaction at the results Avliich he had hitherto achieved through his agency. In England, at Colney Hatch Asylum, a bath has been constructed, and Ave have already successfully treated upAvards of forty cases. Dr. Robertson’s experience at Hay- ward’s Heath is confirmatory of our OAvn, and is so satisfactory that we hope, in a few years, no county asylum will be Avithout the opportunity of confirming his important evidence. The functional disturbances which are leagued so extensively with insanity, the imperfect nutrition of the brain, and, above all, the peculiar condition of the skin, invite the action of the hot- air bath, on reasonable grounds, Avith abundant promise of success. Dr. Robertson alludes to the latter symptom as one * Manila],”,pp. 350- I.