20 APRIL 1861, Page 19

THE TURKISH BATH.* Ir there be any one human contrivance

of which it can with truth be said that it is absolutely perfect, that one is the bath of all baths, the Turkish, "the bath"—we quote Mr. Wilson—"that cleanses the inward as well as the outward man, that is applicable to every age, that is adapted to make health healthier, and alleviate disease what- ever its stage or severity." It combines the various good qualities of all other kinds of bath, with no of their defects and inconveni- ences; whatever good is done partially and uncertainly by any one of them, that the same Turkish bath does thoroughly and without fail; and in the sense of enjoyment and exalted vigour of mind and body which it always imparts, it fairly beats them all put together. "None but a Frank," exclaims Mr. Urquhart, " would calla miserable trough of water a bath." The boxed-up vapour bath is just a degree better, and no more; and all the tedious and irksome processes of the water- cure establishments, ingenious as many of them are, and useful as they have been in their time, may now be classed with the efforts of a barbarous age to provide for urgent wants by means of rough-and- ready substitutes for arts not yet developed. A man may be content to appease his hunger in the Australian bush with damper and half- charred mutton, but he would not prefer them to such a dinner as he could have in a London club ; and it is only under stress of circum- stances that any one, who knows the transcendent merits of the Turkish bath, will ever condescend to return to the meaner expedients that satisfied him in his days of comparative ignorance.

It may serve as physic to our pride of progress to remember how long we have wilfully deprived ourselves of this inestimable inven- tion, which was one of the earliest perfected by man. It was in use among the Plicenicia.ns, from whom, probably, it was borrowed by the Greeks, along with the letters which Cadmus gave them. From the Greeks it passed to the Romans, who propagated it in Britain; but it became extinct there after the Saxon invasion, and the same fate befel it in every other part of the Roman world except the Byzantine empire, where it was at once adopted by the Turkish conquerors. "A people," says Mr. Urquhart, "who knew neither Latin nor Greek have preserved this great monument of antiquity on the soil of Europe, and present to us, who teach our children only Latin and Greek, this institution in all its Roman grandeur and its Grecian taste. The bath, when first seen by the Turks, was a practice of their enemies, religious and political; they mere themselves the filthiest of mortals; yet, no sooner did they see the bath than they adopted it, made it a rule of their society, a necessary adjunct to every settlement, and princes and sultans endowed such institutions for the honour of their name." Perhaps we have great reason to rejoice that when the Turks first set foot in Europe. they were not well supplied with soap, for had they been so, they might have fallen into the same error as ourselves, exaggerating the cleansing effects of simple ablutions with soap and water, and disregarding the incom- parably more efficient means of purification afforded by the processes which the Greeks employed. Hear Miss Nightingale " By simply washing or sponging with water you do not really clean your skin. Take a rough towel, dip one corner in very hot water—if a little spirit be added to it, it will be more effectual—and then rub as if you were rubbing the towel into your skin with your finger. The black flakes which will come off will convince you that you were not clean before, however much soap and water you have used. These flakes are what require removing. And you can really keep yourself cleaner with a tumbler of hot water and a rough towel, and rubbing, than with a whole apparatus of bath, and soap, and sponge, without rubbing." Perfect cleansing of the skin is not the only thing accom- plished in the Turkish bath; quite other effects are produced by the various applications of hot and cold air and water; but the cleansing of the skin is thorough. All the superfluous thickness of the cuticle is converted into pulp, and is rubbed off in rolls that "fall right and left as if spilt from a dish of macaroni." The quantity of this dead matter which will accumulate in a week, obstructing the seven million pores of the skin—Mr. Erasmus Wilson has counted them— depressing its vascular and nervous energy, and impairing its elastic tone, forms, when dry, a ball of the size of the fist. When it is all rubbed and washed away, the bather laid on the conch of repose in the frigidarium, and the cooling completed, then, says Mr. Urqu- hart, "the body has come forth shining like alabaster, fragrant as the cistus, sleek as satin, and soft as velvet. The touch' of the skin is electric."

• The Battens or ruttish Bath: its History, Revival in Britain, and Application to the purposes of Health. By Erasmus Wilson, F.R.S. Churchill. The Turkish bath is much less complex in plan than those of Greece and Rome, and differs from the latter especially, and very advantageously, as Mr. Wilson thinks, in the much more moderate temperatures employed in it. Its essential apartments are three, a large airy hall, a middle chamber, and an inner chamber. The hall serves both as a vestiarium, or dressing-room, and a frigidarium, or cooling-room ; the middle chamber is the tepidarium, or warm room, in which the bather courts a natural and gentle flow of perspiration, and prepares himself to encounter the higher temperature of the inner chamber, which corresponds to the calidarium or sudatorium of the Romans. Both these chambers are heated by furnaces beneath the floor, and the air in them may be either dry or mixed with watery vapour, as it always is in the baths of Constantinople, where its pre- sence implies a low temperature, because watery vapour is scalding at 120 degs., though it ispossible to remain for a short time without injury m dry air at double the temperature of boiling water. After a visit to the first Turkish bath erected in London, a private one, a gentleman wrote to an incredulous friend as follows : "I have been at Mr. Witt's bath ; all that he told was true. I cooked a mutton chop on my .knee, and in eating it afterwards the only inconvenience that I experienced was in the matter of the bread; it became toast before I could get it to my mouth." So curiously different is the action of heat on living and dead organic matter ; and this is not a new fact revealed by the bath. Many years ago " Sir Charles Blag- den remained for ten minutes in a room heated to 260 degs. ; Sir Francis Chantrey's oven in which his moulds were dried, and which was constantly entered by the men, was heated to 350 degs. ; the ovens in the slate-enamelling works of■Mr. Magnus at Pimlico, also habi- tually entered by the workmen, have a temperature of 350 degs. ; and the oven in which Chabert, the so-called fire-king, exhibited in London some years back, was heated to 400 and 500 degs." The Roman baths in republican times were moderately heated, but Seneca complains that in his day the heat was "like that of a furnace, .proper only for the punishment of slaves convicted of the highest misdemeanours. We now seem," he says, " to make no dis- tinction between being warm and burning." In some of the baths erected in England, the part of the calidarium immediately over the furnace, where the heat is greatest, is surrounded with curtains forming an enclosed chamber, which corresponds to the laconicum of the ancient thernate. Mr. Erasmus Wilson has sat for at least ten minutes in the laconicum of Mr. Urquhart's bath at Riverside, and felt not the slightest inconvenience, though the temperature was 240 degs., that is to say 28 degs, above the boiling point of water; but he deprecates the indiscriminate practice of such experiments. High temperatures may be proper as curative means in special cases, but they should only be administered under medical guidance. These exceptional cases apart, "the purpose of the bath is to warm, to relax, to induce a gentk, continuous, and prolonged perspiration. It is obvious that a gentle temperature will effect this object more thoroughly and completely than a burning, parching temperature of 150 degs. and upwards. Our purpose is not to dry up the tissues, to rob the blood of its diluent fluid, but to soften the callous scarf-skin that it may be peeled off, and to take away the excess of fluids per- vading the economy, and with this excess any irritant and morbid matters which they may hold in solution." Hence the best tempera- ture, in Mr. Wilson's opinion, is one that ranges in medium limits, between 120 degs. and 140 degs. In the Turkish bath, as it at present exists in the East, inconvenience resulting from its tempera- ture is scarcely possible, " whereas in the high temperatures at pre- sent in use in London, 170 degs. and 180 degs. of dry air, disagree- able and even dangerous symptoms are extremely common."

The first indication of mischief, under these circumstances, is an increased rapidity of the heart's pulsations, generally accompanied with a feeling approaching to faintness. These symptoms some- times occur to the beginner in the use of the bath, even when the heat is not excessive, and are a sign to him that he should instantly step out of the calidarium into the tepidarium, if there be one, or otherwise into the frigidarium. " The uneasy feeling soon passes away, and then he should return to the calidarium. Ile may do this as often as he likes, and with the most perfect safety; and with this hint it will be his own fault if he suffer any inconvenience whatever." Another caution which the neophyte should observe is to put on his clothing slowly and composedly when the bath is ended, and to avoid hasty movements, in which lies the only .possible danger of catching cold after a well-conducted bath. It is impossible to take cold while perspiring freely in the calidarium; it is equally impossible whilst the pores remain firmly closed after the cooling has been duly effected ; the only danger lies in the unseasonable renewal of the perspiration. It is to prevent this that when a Russian has heated himself in a vapour bath he immediately plunges into snow, and that the last operation in the English calidarium is to douse the bather with cold water, an act which is inexpressibly grateful to the sensa- tions, and in which there is not the shadow of danger. You may take a cold with you into the calidarium, but it will be your own fault if you do not leave it behind you there when you come out ; and your liability to a fresh attack will be diminished by every subsequent visit, for the bath will render you almost casehardened against the influence of cold. A friend of Mr. Wilson's, regular in his habits, active and moderate in his diet, but so encumbered with fat that he could not walk the length of a street without panting, has become a new man under the regular use of the bath. "He looks fresh and well, and more shapely ; he knows no fatigue in walking; during the late severe winter he has required no great-coat ; in the midst of the bitterest frost be walked to the Serpentine in his shirt-sleeves, with his coat upon his arm, and his clothing is now his only incumbranze."

A fine athletic child of five years old, brought up in Mr. Urquhart's bath, and who has never worn, other clothes than a loose linen gar- ment, was met one wintry day, when the snow was on the ground, walking in the garden, perfectly naked. "Do you feel cold ?" he was asked. " 'Cold !' said the boy, touching his skin doubtfully with his finger, 'yes, I think I do feel cold.' That is, he felt cold to his outward touch, but not to his inward sensations, and it required that he should pass his finger over the surface of his body, as he would have done over a marble statue, to be sure, not that he was cold, for that he was not, but to be convinced that his surface felt cold."

The ladies and gentlemen of Cuba wear pocket-handkerchiefs in full dress, but it is only for show ; our northern use of such articles is to them unknown, for their beneficent climate exempts them from that ignoble necessity. The Greeks and Romans enjoyed the same happy immunity. The handkerchief which they used occasionally, but not habitually, was a sudarium, a cloth for wiping away perspira- tion, and not needed for other purposes. Now it was certainly not the climate of Rome or of Athens that preserved their inhabitants from catarrhs and the madidi infantia nas ; it was the bath; and why may we not hope that the bath will do as much for us?

Race-horses, prize-fighters, prize-rowers and others, undergo an arduous course of training that they may be brought into the highest state of physical vigour, by the removal of all effete matter from their bodies, and the deposit of new and sound matter in its place. Pre- cisely the same kind of physical improvement is effected in his own person by the frequenter of the Turkish bath, without effort and without exhaustion. The Romans kept their armies in health and strength by means of the bath; and by the same means we English may indefinitely increase our individual and collective capacity for action. "Let us suppose," says Mr. Wilson, "that we have the power, by an easy, pleasant process, of extracting the old, the bad, the useless, even the decayed and diseased stuff from the blood and from the system by means of the bath; how simple the operation by which we could give back in its place wholesome and nutritious material. Where would be atrophy and scrofula if we had this power ?—and this power is, I believe, fast approaching, fast coming within our reach, by means of the Eastern -bath. We squeeze the sponge as we will; we replenish it as we will." Further on he adds :

" One of the most important properties of the bath is its power of preserving i

that balance of the nutritive functions of the body which in its essence is health; in other words, preserving the condition of the body. The healthy condition implies an exact equipoise of the fluids and the solids, of the muscular and the fatty tissues, of the waste and the supply. This state of the body is normally preserved by a proportioned amount of air, exercise or labour, and food ; but even the air, the exercise, the labour, and the food must be apportioned, in its kind and in its order, to the peculiar constitution of the individual. Those who have ever had occasion to reflect on this subject, must have felt the difficulties which surround it, and have been aware how extremely difficult it is to say what may be faulty in our mode of using these necessaries of our existence. If I were asked to select an example, as a standard of the just equipoise of these coali- tions, I should take the ploughman; intellect at the standard of day to day existence, moderate food, vigorous but not over-strained labour, plenty of air, and plentiful exposure. But who would care to accept existence on such terms as these? Give us brain, give us mind, however ungovernable, however prepon- derant its overweight to the physical powers, however destructive to the powers of the body. In a word, we select a morbid condition : our meals, our air, our exercise, our in-door and out-door habits are all unsound; we prefer that they should be unsound ; the necessities of our life, of our position, require that they should be unsound. How grand, therefore, the boon that will correct these evils without the necessity for making any inconvenient alteration in our habits/ "THAT BOON IS THIS BATH. The bath promotes those changes in the blood for which fresh air is otherwise needful. The bath gives us appetite, and strengthens digestion. The bath serves us in lien of exercise. ' The people who use it,' writes Mr. Urquhart, ' do not require exercise for health, and can pass from the extreme of indolence to that of toil.' How glorious a panacea for those home-loving matrons whom no inducement can draw forth from their Larvaand Penates, to enjoy a daily wholesome exercise, and who, as a consequence, become large, and full, and fat, and bilious, and wheezy ; and who, in their breach of Heaven's law, lay the foundation of heart disease. A nation without the bath is deprived of a large portion of the health and inoffensive enjoyment within man's reach ; it therefore increases the value of a people to itself, and its power as a nation over other people.' "