The Historical and local new Bath guide : containing an accurate description of the public buildings, institutions, and amusements of the city; with observations on the medicinal virtues, and directions for the use of the hot waters.

Date:
1823
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Historical and local new Bath guide : containing an accurate description of the public buildings, institutions, and amusements of the city; with observations on the medicinal virtues, and directions for the use of the hot waters. 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.

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    regimen, and incessant toil, made our robust ancestors, subject but to few distempers, and of course, little needing the medicinal virtues of the Bath Waters. History of Bath from the Roman Conquest. Quitting the regions of fable, and discarding as fic- tions the. legendary stories preserved with so much care and veneration by our ancestors, we shall now proceed •with the earliest authentic History of Bath, which may, •with confidence, be dated from the first arrival of the Roman Legions in the West of Britain. Of the aboriginal Britons and the Hosdui, a tribe of Gauls, who preceded the Proper Belgae, and their succes- sors, the llomans, little is recorded, and less known. The simple modes of pastoral life are nearly the same in every age and country. The chief occupations of an uncivilized people, being little else than the care of providing for the necessities of nature and self-protection. Their habitations, caves, or huts, rudely constructed of earth, bows and such materials, as required little of the arts and ingenuity of civilization in their application. Their dress, as their food, the produce of the chace and what nature might spontauiously yield. Their minds, without cultivation, and their manners, without refinements—living with little sense of social and moral obligations, aud consequently with very vague and unworthy notions of religion, and the duties it inculcates. In short, their reasoning faculties scarcely exerted beyond the directions of instinct, and merely suflicicnt to prolong an animal existence. Such was the condition of our ancestors, if we can so consider them, through the changes and revolutions of two thousand years, and such had it. probably remained, but for the invasion of a more enlightened people. A tribe of the Belga, who about five centuries before the Christian aera, migrated from their own country Galia Belgica, and sought a settlement along the southern coasts of this kingdom, displayed more civilized modes of life and manners; they brought with them proper ideas of ci- vilization, which they acquired from an intercourse with other nations at home. The building of towns, the esta-