Metcalfe's Hydropathic Establishment, (Limited,) Wellington Square, Hastings : synopsis of the theory and practice of hydrotherapy with a sketch of the rise and progress of the Turkish bath / Richard Metcalfe.

  • Metcalfe, Richard.
Date:
[1890?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Metcalfe's Hydropathic Establishment, (Limited,) Wellington Square, Hastings : synopsis of the theory and practice of hydrotherapy with a sketch of the rise and progress of the Turkish bath / Richard Metcalfe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    19/36 (page 17)
    A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ROMAN OR TURKISH BATH. Above all “ Sudorifics,’’ the Hot Air or Turkish Bath possesses a very marked superiority. It is the most effective, if not the most ancient, of sudorific processes, and as the idea of warm water and vapour baths may be traced to natural hot springs, so may that of hot-air baths to the effects of the solar heat on the objects, animate or inanimate, exposed to it. Going so far back as existing records will carry us, Homer, the father of Greek poetry and the poetic art, describes his heroes as refreshing themselves with -the warm bath during the Trojan war (b.c. 1194), and we know that the hot air both was systematically employed in the renowned Greek gymnasia as part of the admirable system of physical training there pursued. Greece probably derived her hot air bath from Asia, though of that there is no certainty. She caused it to form part of her unrivalled national institution, yet, strange to say, never thought of it as a household convenience—since we find the father of physic, Hippocrates, prevented from prescribing it in some cases on account of the difficulty of obtaining it. The Romans, on the other hand, who borrowed the hot-air bath, with its concomitants, rubbing, anointing, &c., from the Greeks, made it subservient to private convenience and luxury as well as to public accommodation. In the days of the Empire, both the public baths for the people and the private baths attached to the •dwellings of the rich were made marvels of architectural magnificence. Especially so were the baths of Nero, Titus, Caligula, and Dioclesian. They were not only of wonderful extent .and grandeur, but filled with the most costly works of art, paintings, sculptures, and every elegant decoration in metals, marbles, and precious stones. Some are disposed to regard the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon as the home of the bath, so far as the civilised world is ‘concerned ; and certainly it is easy to understand how from Tyre and Sidon a knowledge of the bath would find its way along the shores of the Mediterranean to Egypt, and Northern Africa as far .as the pillars of Hercules on the one side, and to Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, Iberia, and the furthest west on the other. Then on the landward side the line of caravan communication would serve to transmit like knowledge to Russia, Persia, Tartary, China, and Hindostan. America might have received the bath either from Phoenician merchantmen on its eastern, or Chinese voyagers along its western shores. And diverse as have been the forms and details of the bath’s processes in those regions severally, the principle has been one throughout. And, indeed, so likely is this principle to suggest and commend itself to the human mind, that if the foregoing theory of the spread of the institution of the bath be rejected, it is no great stretch of imagination to suppose that