The new Irish bath versus the old Turkish, or, Pure air versus vapour : being an answer to the errors and mis-statements of Drs. Madden and Corrigan / edited by Photophilus.

Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The new Irish bath versus the old Turkish, or, Pure air versus vapour : being an answer to the errors and mis-statements of Drs. Madden and Corrigan / edited by Photophilus. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    26/64 (page 22)
    lead the medical profession and the public to a right con- clusion upon the question at issue, viz.—the relative merits of the Eastern and Western bath. I cannot but feel myself upon safe ground, when I say- that at starting, I can fully agree with Dr. Corrigan that the hot air bath will become a most ''useful adjuvant to the medical science in our country, and with Dr. Madden, in the opinion that under medical control and direction, it will become a very great blessing to humanity, I do moreover further concur with Drs. Madden and Corrigan in their condemnation of a parched air bath, contaminated by the effluvia of coke in a state of combus- tion. I trust I may never be condemned to undergo such a process, from which (my experience having been hitherto confined to the Western or Blarney bath) I have never in the slightest degree suffered. I have never ex- perienced, or imagined that I experienced, such a sensation in the Bray bath, to which I presume Dr. Madden refers; but then I was fortified against any nervous suggestion of the kind, by the knowledge that the hot air flues commu- nicating with the furnace are hermetically secured, and that the objectionable effluvia of coke, in a state of com- bustion, are only permitted to contaminate the external atmosphere, at an elevation of more than 60 feet above the heads of the bathers ; and that the slender tower-like shaft, which lends additional beauty to that graceful building, also discharges important utilitarian duties, and insures the due exit of the combusted coke, after the latter, in its pas- sage through the network of flues, has communicated its genial heat, but not its contamination, to the bathing rooms. But had I sought for an additional guarantee for the salubrity of the atmosphere in which I lay, I had it in that very communication beneath the bench, to which Dr. Madden refers, and the mouth of which is not in one of the furnaces nearest to it, but outside the building in the open air, from whence, under this admirable system, a pure supply of atmospheric air is always ensured, and at the same time heated in its course through tortuous channels, which pass above the heated floors, and beneath the bench referred to. This ingenious contrivance can scarcely be the result of ignorance,'' or false representa- tion, or foolish economy on the part of the projector;