Part 8

The piscinae were often of immense size--that of Diocletian being 200 ft. long--and were adorned with beautiful marbles. The halls were crowded with magnificent columns and were ornamented with the finest pieces of statuary. The walls, it has been said, were covered with exquisite mosaics that imitated the art of the painter in their elegance of design and variety of colour. The Egyptian syenite was encrusted with the precious green marbles of Numidia. The rooms contained the works of Phidias and Praxiteles. A perpetual stream of water was poured into capacious basins through the wide mouths of lions of bright and polished silver, water issued from silver, and was received on silver. "To such a pitch of luxury have we reached," says Seneca, "that we are dissatisfied if we do not tread on gems in our baths."

The richer Romans used every variety of oils and pomades (_smegmata_); they scarcely had true soaps. The poorer class had to be content with the flour of lentils, an article used at this day for the same purpose by Orientals. The most important bath utensil was the strigillus, a curved instrument made of metal, with which the skin was scraped and all sordes removed.

The bath servants assisted in anointing, in using the strigillus and in various other menial offices. The poorer classes had to use their strigils themselves. The various processes of the aliptae seem to have been carried on very systematically.

[Illustration: FIG. 6.[1] Ring on which are suspended some of the articles in use in the Alipterium]

The hot baths appear to have been open from 1 P.M. till dark. It was only one of the later emperors that had them lighted up at night. When the hot baths were ready (for, doubtless, the plunge baths were available at an earlier hour), a bell or _aes_ was rung for the information of the people. Among the Greeks and Romans the eighth hour, or 1 o'clock, before their dinner, was the commonest hour for bathing. The bath was supposed to promote appetite, and some voluptuaries had one or more baths after dinner, to enable them to begin eating again; but such excesses, as Juvenal tells us, occasionally proved fatal. Some of the most effeminate of the emperors are said to have bathed seven or eight times in the course of the day. In early times there was delicacy of feeling about the sexes bathing together--even a father could not bathe with his sons; but latterly, under most of the emperors, men and women often used the same baths. There frequently were separate baths for the women, as we see at Pompeii or at Badenweiler; but although respectable matrons would not go to public baths, promiscuous bathing was common during the Empire.

The public baths and thermae were under the more immediate superintendence of the aediles. The charge made at a public bath was only a quadrans or quarter of an as, about half a farthing. Yet cheap though this was, the emperors used to ingratiate themselves with the populace, by making the baths at times gratuitous.

Wherever the Romans settled, they built public baths; and wherever they found hot springs or natural stufae, they made use of them, thus saving the expense of heating, as at the _myrteta_ of Baiae or the _Aquae Sulis_ of Bath. In the cities there appear to have been private baths for hire, as well as the public baths; and every rich citizen had a set of baths attached to his villa, the fullest account of which is given in the _Letters_ of Pliny, or in Ausonius's _Account of a Villa on the Moselle_, or in Statius's _De Balneo Etrusco_. Although the Romans never wholly gave up cold bathing, and that practice was revived under Augustus by Antonius Musa, and again under Nero by Charmis (at which later time bathing in the open sea became common), yet they chiefly practised warm bathing (_calida lavatio_). This is the most luxurious kind of bathing, and when indulged in to excess is enervating. The women were particularly fond of these baths, and were accused, at all events in some provincial cities, of drunkenness in them.

The unbounded license of the public baths, and their connexion with modes of amusement that were condemned, led to their being to a considerable extent proscribed by the early Christians. The early Fathers wrote that bathing might be practised for the sake of cleanliness or of health, but not of pleasure; and Gregory the Great saw no objection to baths being used on Sunday. About the 5th century many of the large thermae in Rome fell into decay. The cutting off of the aqueducts by the Huns, and the gradual decrease of the population, contributed to this. Still it is doubtful whether bathing was ever disused to the extent that is usually represented. It was certainly kept up in the East in full vigour at Alexandria and at Brusa. Hot bathing, and especially hot air and vapour baths, were adopted by the Mahommedans; and the Arabs brought them with them into Spain. The Turks, at a later time, carried them high up the Danube, and the Mahommedans spread or, it may be more correct to say, revived their use in Persia and in Hindustan. The Crusaders also contributed to the spread of baths in Europe, and hot vapour baths were specially recommended for the leprosy so prevalent in those days. After the commencement of the 13th century there were few large cities in Europe without hot vapour baths. We have full accounts of their regulations--how the Jews were only allowed to visit them once a week, and how there were separate baths for lepers. In England they were called hothouses. Erasmus, at the date of the Reformation, spoke of them as common in France, Germany and Belgium; he gives a lively account of the mixture of all classes of people to be found in them, and would imply that they were a common adjunct to inns. They seem after a time to have become less common, though Montaigne mentions them as being still in Rome in his day. In England the next revival of baths was at the close of the 17th century, under the Eastern name of _Hummums_ or the Italian name of Bagnios. These were avowedly on the principle of the Turkish baths described below. But there were several considerable epochs in the history of baths, one in the commencement of the 18th century, when Floyer and others recalled attention to cold bathing, of which the virtues had long been overlooked. In the middle of the century also, Russell and others revived sea-bathing in England, and were followed by others on the continent, until the value of sea-bathing became fully appreciated. Later in the same century the experiments of James Currie on the action of complete or of partial baths on the system in disease attracted attention; and though forgotten for a while, they bore abundant fruit in more recent times.

_Modern Baths._--It is uncertain how far the Turkish and Egyptian and even the Russian baths are to be regarded merely as successors of the Roman baths, because the principle of vapour baths has been known to many nations in a very early period of civilization. Thus the Mexicans and Indians were found using small vapour baths. The ancient inhabitants of Ireland and of Scotland had some notion of their use, and the large vapour baths of Japan, now so extensively employed, are probably of independent origin.

The following accounts of Turkish and Russian baths illustrate the practices of the ancient Roman and also of modern Turkish baths. In Lane's _On the Modern Egyptians_ we read: "The building consists of several apartments, all of which are paved with marble, chiefly white. The inner apartments are covered with domes, which have a number of small glazed apertures for the admission of light. The bather, on entering, if he has a watch or purse, gives them in charge to the keeper of the bath. The servant of the bath takes off his shoes and supplies him with a pair of wooden clogs. The first apartment has generally three or four _leewans_ (raised parts of the floor used as couches) cased with marble, and a fountain of cold water, which rises from an octagonal basement in the centre. One of the leewans, which is meant for the higher classes, is furnished with cushions or mats. In warm weather bathers usually undress in this room; in winter they undress in an inner room, called the _beytowwal_ or first chamber, between which and the last apartment there is a passage often with two or three latrines off it. This is the first of the heated chambers. It generally has two raised seats. The bather receives a napkin in which to put his clothes and another to put round his waist--this reaches to the knees; a third, if he requires it, is brought him to wind round his head, leaving the top of it bare; a fourth to put over his chest; and a fifth to cover his back. When the bather has undressed, the attendant opens to him the door of the inner and principal apartment. This in general has four leewans, which gives it the form of a cross, and in the centre a fountain of hot water rises from a small shallow basin. The centre room, with the adjoining ones, forms almost a square. The beytowwal already mentioned is one of them. Two small chambers which adjoin each other, one containing a tank of hot water, the other containing a trough, over which are two taps, one of hot and one of cold water, occupy the two other angles; while the fourth angle of the square is occupied by the chamber which contains the fire, over which is the boiler. The bather having entered this apartment soon perspires profusely from the humid heat which is produced by the hot water of tanks and fountains, and by the steam of the boiler. The bather sits on one of the marble seats, or lies on the leewan or near one of the tanks, and the operator then commences his work. The operator first cracks aloud every joint in the body. He makes the vertebrae of the back and even of the neck crack. The limbs are twisted with apparent violence, but so skilfully, that no harm is ever done. The operator next kneads the patient's flesh. After this he rubs the soles of the feet with a kind of rasp of baked clay. There are two kinds of rasps, one porous and rough, one of fine smooth clay. Those used by ladies are usually encased in thin embossed silver. The next operation is rubbing the bather's flesh with a small coarse woollen bag, after which the bather dips himself in one of the tanks. He is next taken to one of the chambers in the corner, and the operator lathers the bather with fibres of the palm tree, soap and water. The soap is then washed off with water, when the bather having finished washing, and enveloped himself in dry towels, returns to the beytowwal and reclines. Here he generally remains an hour to an hour and a half, sipping coffee and smoking, while an attendant rubs the soles of the feet and kneads the body and limbs. The bather then dresses and goes out."

The following description of a Russian bath is from Kohl's _Russia_ (1842): "The passage from the door is divided into two behind the check-taker's post, one for the male, one for the female guests. We first enter an open space, in which a set of men are sitting in a state of nudity on benches, those who have already bathed dressing, while those who are going to undergo the process take off their clothes. Round this space or apartment are the doors leading to the vapour-rooms. The bather is ushered into them, and finds himself in a room full of vapour, which is surrounded by a wooden platform rising in steps to near the roof of the room. The bather is made to lie down on one of the lower benches, and gradually to ascend to the higher and hotter ones. The first sensation on entering the room amounts almost to a feeling of suffocation. After you have been subjected for some time to a temperature which may rise to 145 deg. the transpiration reaches its full activity, and the sensation is very pleasant. The bath attendants come and flog you with birchen twigs, cover you with the lather of soap, afterwards rub it off, and then hold you over a jet of ice-cold water. The shock is great, but is followed by a pleasant feeling of great comfort and of alleviation of any rheumatic pains you may have had. In regular establishments you go after this and lie down on a bed for a time before issuing forth. But the Russians often dress in the open air, and instead of using the jet of cold water, go and roll themselves at once in the snow."

Turkish baths have, with various modifications, become popular in Europe. The Russian baths were introduced into German towns about 1825. They had a certain limited amount of popularity, but did not take firm root. Another class practically owes its origin to Dr Barter and David Urquhart. It professed to be founded on the Turkish bath, but in reality it was much more of a hot air bath, i.e. more devoid of vapour than either Roman or Turkish baths ever were, for it is doubtful whether in any case the air of the laconicum was free from vapour. These baths, with their various modifications, have become extremely popular in Great Britain, in Germany and in northern Europe, but have, curiously enough, never been used extensively in France, notwithstanding the familiarity of the French with Turkish baths in Algiers.

In England hot air baths are now employed very extensively. They are often associated with Turkish and electric baths.

Bathing among the ancients was practised in various forms. It was sometimes a simple bath in cold or in tepid water; but at least, in the case of the higher orders, it usually included a hot air or vapour bath, and was followed by affusion of cold or warm water, and generally by a plunge into the piscina. In like manner the order varies in which the different processes are gone through in Turkish baths in modern Europe. Thus in the baths in Vienna, the process begins by immersion in a large basin of warm water. Sudation is repeatedly interrupted by cold douches at the will of the bathers, and after the bath they are satisfied with a short stay in the cooling-room, where they have only a simple sheet rolled round them. In Copenhagen and in Stockholm the Oriental baths have been considerably modified by their association with hydropathic practices.

This leads us to notice the introduction of the curiously misnamed system known as hydropathy (q.v.). Although cold baths were in vogue for a time in Rome, warm baths were always more popular. Floyer, as we have seen, did something to revive their use in England; but it was nearly a century and a half afterwards that a Silesian peasant, Priessnitz, introduced, with wonderful success, a variety of operations with cold water, the most important of which was the packing the patient in a wet sheet, a process which after a time is followed by profuse sudation. Large establishments for carrying out this mode of bathing and its modifications were erected in many places on the continent and in Great Britain, and enjoyed at one time a large share of popularity. The name "hydropathic" is still retained for these establishments, though hydropathy so-called is no longer practised within them to any extent.

But the greatest and most important development of ordinary baths in modern times was in England, though it has extended gradually to some parts of the continent. The English had long used affusion and swimming-baths freely in India. Cold and hot baths and shower baths have been introduced into private houses to an extent never known before; and, since 1842, public swimming-baths, besides separate baths, have been supplied to the public at very moderate rates, in some cases associated with wash-houses for the poorer classes. Their number has increased rapidly in London and in the principal continental cities. Floating-baths in rivers, always known in some German towns, have become common wherever there are flowing streams. The better supply of most European cities with water has aided in this movement. Ample enclosed swimming-baths have been erected at many seaside places. When required, the water, if not heated in a boiler, is raised to a sufficient temperature by the aid of hot water pipes or of steam. Separate baths used to be of wood, painted; they are now most frequently of metal, painted or lined with porcelain enamel. The swimming-baths are lined with cement, tiles or marble and porcelain slabs; and a good deal of ornamentation and painting of the walls and ceiling of the apartments, in imitation of the ancients, has been attempted.

We have thus traced in outline the history of baths through successive ages. The medium of the baths spoken of thus far has been water, vapour or dry hot air. But baths of more complex nature, and of the greatest variety, have been in use from the earliest ages. The best known media are the various mineral waters and sea-water. Of baths of _mineral_ substances, those of sand are the oldest and best known; the practice of _arenation_ or of burying the body in the sand of the sea-shore, or in heated sand near some hot spring, is very ancient, as also that of applying heated sand to various parts of the body. Baths of _peat_ earth are of comparatively recent origin. The peat earth is carefully prepared and pulverized, and then worked up with water into a pasty consistence, of which the temperature can be regulated before the patient immerses himself in it.

There are various terms that may be termed _chemical_, in which chlorine or hydrochloric acid is added to the water of the bath, or where fumes of sulphur are made to rise and envelop the body.

Of _vegetable_ baths the number is very large. Lees of wine, in a state of fermentation, have been employed. An immense variety of aromatic herbs have been used to impregnate water with. At one time fuci or sea-weed were added to baths, under the idea of conveying into the system the iodine which they contain; but by far the most popular of all vegetable baths are those made with an extract got by distilling certain varieties of pine leaves.

The strangeness of the baths of _animal_ substances, that have been at various times in use, is such that their employment seems scarcely credible. That baths of milk or of whey might be not unpopular is not surprising, but baths of blood, in some cases even of human blood, have been used; and baths of horse dung were for many ages in high favour, and were even succeeded for a short time by baths of guano.

_Electrical_ baths are now largely used, a current being passed through the water; and electrical _massage_, by the d'Arsonval or other system, is colloquially termed a "bath."

Baths also of _compressed air_, in which the patient is subjected to the pressure of two or three atmospheres, were formerly employed in some places.

A _sun_ bath (_insolatio_ or _heliosis_), exposing the body to the sun, the head being covered, was a favourite practice among the Greeks and Romans.

Some special devices require a few words of explanation.

_Douches_ were used by the ancients, and have always been an important mode of applying water to a circumscribed portion of the body. They are, in fact, spouts of water, varying in size and temperature, applied by a hose-pipe with more or less force for a longer or shorter time against

## particular parts. A douche exercises a certain amount of friction, and a

continued impulse on the spot to which it is applied, which stimulate the skin and the parts beneath it, quickening the capillary circulation. The effects of the douche are so powerful that it cannot be applied for more than a few minutes continuously. The alternation of hot and cold douches, which for some unknown reason has got the name of _Ecossaise_, is a very potent type of bath from the strong action and reaction which it produces. The _shower_ bath may be regarded as a union of an immense number of fine douches projected on the head and shoulders. It produces a strong effect on the nervous system. An ingenious contrivance for giving circular _spray_ baths, by which water is propelled laterally in fine streams against every portion of the surface of the body, is now common.

To all these modes of acting on the cutaneous surface and circulation must be added dry rubbing, as practised by the patient with the flesh glove, but much more thoroughly by the bath attendants, if properly instructed (see also MASSAGE).

_Action of Baths on the Human System._--The primary operation of baths is the action of heat and cold on the cutaneous surfaces through the medium of water.

The first purpose of baths is simply that of abstersion and cleanliness, to remove any foreign impurity from the surface, and to prevent the pores from being clogged by their own secretions or by desquamations of cuticle. It need scarcely be said that such objects are greatly promoted by the action of the alkali of soaps and by friction; that the use of warm water, owing to its immediate stimulation of the skin, promotes the separation of sordes, and that the vapour of water is still more efficient than water itself.

It has been supposed that water acts on the system by being absorbed through the skin, but, under ordinary circumstances, no water is absorbed, or, if any, so minute a quantity as not to be worth considering. No dissolved substances, under the ordinary circumstances of a bath, are actually absorbed into the system; although when a portion of skin has been entirely cleared of its sebaceous secretion, it is possible that a strong solution of salts may be partially absorbed. In the case of medicated baths we therefore only look (in addition to the action of heat and cold, or more properly to the abstraction or communication and retention of heat) to any stimulant action on the skin that the ingredients of the bath may possess.

The powerful influence of water on the capillaries of the skin, and the mode and extent of that operation, depend primarily on the temperature of the fluid. The human system bears changes of temperature of the air much better than changes of the temperature of water. While the temperature of the air at 75 deg. may be too warm for the feelings of many people, a continued bath at that temperature is felt to be cold and depressing. Again, a bath of 98 deg. to 102 deg. acts far more excitingly than air of the same temperature, both because, being a better conductor, water brings more heat to the body and because it suppresses the perspiration which is greatly augmented by air of that temperature. Further, a temperature a few degrees below blood heat is that of indifferent baths, which can be borne longest without natural disturbance of the system.