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5:
Controversy and problems
It
seems as though there was no aspect of Turkish baths which was not
controversial. As we have seen in (4: Some early publications)
many early proponents of the bath were avid pamphleteers and writers
of letters to the press, often making personal attacks on each other
as they argued over different aspects of the ‘ideal bath’.
Early
in 1860, Dr Barter and his supporters became involved in a major
controversy over the very important issue of whether a genuine Turkish
bath should use hot air which was dry, or hot air which was humid.
It started in the columns of the Irish medical press, spread
immediately to the local newspapers (becoming also an attack on
Barter’s baths), and soon occupied the correspondence columns of the
newspapers, sporting papers and medical journals in England.
The
dispute began with Dr (later Sir) Dominic Madden publishing an article
supporting a
colleague, Dr Corrigan, who had strongly
criticised Dr Barter's Turkish baths. They first objected to
Barter's practice of heating his 'Improved Turkish Bath' with dry air,
claiming that real Turkish baths in Constantinople were humid.
Consequently, they criticised a widely accepted definition of
the Turkish bath which had appeared in a pamphlet, Life in a tub,
by the pseudonymous author
DIOGENHS (Diogenes). Finally, and foolishly, they criticised the ventilation of
Barter's establishments, claiming that they were a health hazard.
The
whole dispute, in which Barter was eventually vindicated, is related
(with copious extracts from the original documents) in another
pamphlet, 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’. The arguments of Dr Corrigan were also
comprehensively refuted in Durham Dunlop’s book, and the views
expressed in these two publications help to explain the confusion
between dry and humid baths which frequen tly still exists.
(This correspondence is treated in more detail in
The Hot air
controversy’ in the
History Section
of this website)
The
"correct" temperatures
A nother
question which occupied the minds of early correspondents
concerned the air temperatures to be provided in each of the rooms of
the bath. You can, in fact, still hear arguments about this subject in
today's Turkish baths.
In
1861 a paragraph appeared in The Lancet from the Roman
Bath Co Ltd asking for medical advice about the optimum temperature
for the bath they were planning in Cambridge. It was answered by Dr
Edward J Tilt, author of the best-selling Elements of health and
principles of female hygiene, who supported Barter’s original
recommendation of between 110-150°F,
and deplored the fact that in London the hottest rooms were never less
than 170°F,
and in one public bath the temperature rose to 183°F
.
Dr
Wollaston, Physician to South Staffordshire Hospital, wrote
agreeing with Tilt and stressing the importance of such observations,
as
the baths are getting into the hands of ignorant quacks, thereby
bringing into disrepute a mode of alleviating many complaints which
the agency of medicines has failed to cure, or which cures them in a
protracted and uncertain manner.
This
view was not uniquely held. Even amongst those doctors who accepted
the value of the Turkish bath in the alleviation of pain resulting
from attacks of gout and neuralgia, there were many who jealously
guarded what they considered their right to be the only dispensers of
the treatment.
Henry
Walter Kiallmark, late Surgeon of the Ottoman Medical Staff—who
omitted to mention that he was a Director of the Roman Baths Co
Ltd—agreed that no harm would come to the skin with a dry heat of
180°F,
but if 120°F
was adequate, why go higher?
The
dispute was simultaneously sparked off in The British medical
journal by another letter from Dr Wollaston, this time commenting
on a report of the discussion at the end of Dr Thudichum’s lecture
to the Medical Society.
Wollaston wrote that he had taken his thermometer to various baths in
Turkey where the hottest temperature was 150-160°F,
although he thought 130°F
perfectly adequate.
But Dr Haughton, Manager of the Mulberry Street baths owned by the
Oriental Bath Company of Liverpool, wrote that the temperatures he
found in Turkey were still 20-30
degrees lower than those of Dr Wollaston, and that he had
tested them with his thermometer.
These
disputes continued throughout the latter half of the nineteenth
century, I G Douglas Kerr commenting 38 years later, in
1899, that,
A
frequent source of error...springs from the habit of placing the
thermometer in Turkish baths high above the bather’s head, where the
hot air rising gives a false registration. One has only to stand up on
the level of the thermometer to become painfully conscious of this
fact.
Sunday
opening
A
c ontroversy of a completely different kind occurred in 1864. Bury
Council, which had just invested a considerable sum of public
money in the provision of expensive bathing facilities,
determined that it was important to ensure that they were available
for use as much as possible. But when Members unanimously decided to
open the Turkish bath for a few hours on Sunday mornings, the
announcement caused a furore. Letters, mostly pseudonymous, were
published in the Bury times almost weekly during
November and December. Support for the opening came from as far as
Rochdale where they,
have
a Turkish Bath…which is open on a Sunday, and the Christians
here—who are I suppose as good as the Bury Christians—make no
objection. And why should they? They are not compelled to go.
Over
twenty years later, the owner of the Putney Turkish baths still had
the same problem. He complained,
when explaining why the baths were not better used, that merely having
a cheaper entrance charge on Thursday afternoons would not solve his
problem because,
Pressure
from Church and Chapel prevented the baths from opening on
Sunday—the only day the working classes had sufficient time.
Heating
and ventilation
There
were also considerable technical problems which had to be resolved and
which gave rise to much controversy, particularly between proprietors
of rival establishments. Much was written about how best to achieve
the very high air temperatures thought to be necessary, and how to
ensure—prior to the availability of an effective electric fan—that
the baths were adequately ventilated. It was not merely that the hot
rooms needed ventilation; many of the early heating systems failed to
separate the clean hot air from the combustion fumes.
To
exacerbate matters, until the end of the century almost all
establishments were lit by gas, adding further to the ventilation
problem. Almost thirty years were to elapse between the building of
Barter's first bath and and the opening, in 1885, of the first Turkish
bath to be lit by electricity—the Savoy, just off London’s
Strand.
While some of the
first Turkish bath proprietors merely tried to re-invent the Roman
wheel, others were gifted innovators. Joseph Constantine, who had run
a vapour bath in Manchester since 1850, added his first Turkish bath
seven years later. But like Thomas Whitaker (who ran his as an adjunct
to The Whitaker Heating Apparatus Company of Bolton), Constantine had
great difficulty finding a suitable air heater. Working together,
however, they invented the ‘Convoluted Stove’, jointly taking out
a patent on it in 1866. It was to become ‘the industry standard’
and was widely used to heat not only Turkish baths, but also churches,
and many other large buildings (including the original Manchester Free
Trade Hall.)
Some
of the solutions to technical problems involved in the running of
Turkish baths undoubtedly helped to move the boundaries of building
technology forward. In 1879, for example, J L Bruce read an extremely
technical paper before the Glasgow Philosophical Society
in which he reported on his detailed comparison of the heating
and ventilation systems of two local Turkish baths. The systems he
compared were at the Victoria Baths Club (heated by Pennycook's Patent
Caloric Multitubular Stove), and at the Arlington Club (still open and
thriving today, but no longer heated by Constantine's Convoluted
Stove.)
Before
this date, few practical experiments seem to have been undertaken
anywhere to compare the efficiency of different types of stove.
This may also have been one of the first occasions that heat
calculations had been used in the context of building design.
6: The rise & acceptance of the Victorian Turkish bath
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