Essay on the nature and treatment of cholera and fever : with medical remarks on the treatment of cattle plague : also an appendix on public health / by James Tucker.

  • Tucker, James.
Date:
1865
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essay on the nature and treatment of cholera and fever : with medical remarks on the treatment of cattle plague : also an appendix on public health / by James Tucker. 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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    Urquhart’s Manual of the Turkish Bath, edited by Sir Job. Fife, F.F.C.S.). At page 341 state:—“The rational scientific treatment should be to aid nature to eliminate the poison, the whole poison, and nothing but the poison; bring about a diversion by action on the skin—by hot air baths, which are calculated to bring blood to the sui'face of the skin, as Dr. Armstrong said, in pounds, and thus relieve internal congestions and inflammations.” “ Cold water to drink, and hot air to breathe will eliminate blood poisons by perspiration, produce a crisis as in fever, while hot air of high temperature, 240°, kills vermin, their eggs, and all animal poisons, pestilential germs included.” I cannot conclude without a brief notice of the hot-air bath, a sanitary institution which, notwithstanding many abuses in ancient and modern times, has contributed towards the promotion of per- sonal and public health, and the prevention and cure of many diseases. For those of sedentary habits who cannot enjoy a sufficiency of electro-muscular exercise, they can have in the thermo-electrical hot-air bath a sanitary substitute, in which the pores can be opened, the lungs expanded, the whole system venti- lated, and the refuse and noxious matters eliminated by copious perspu-ation. “ In the sweat of the face shalt thou eat bread,” then wash and be clean, for “ cleanliness is next to Godliness,” are house- hold words on the physical virtue of personal purification. There is, however, as much difference between a purified hot-air bath and a foul hot-air bath as there is between a pure cm*rent of spring water and a stagnant putrid pool. There can be no greater salutary luxury than the former, and no greater noxious evil than the latter. They should be placed under sanitary inspection, to protect bath operatees against the respiration of the foul re-breathed air of over- crowded and ill-ventilated baths. Dr. M‘Cormac, M.D., of Belfast, has fully exposed, in his able work on consumption, the noxious influence of ill-ventilated apartments in promoting, by the respira- tion of foul air, pulmonary consumption, and other tubercular diseases. The patented bath of Dr. Bolton, of Leicester, which is preferred at the Newcastle Infirmary, and the radiated hot-air batli