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8:
Turkish baths for special needs
From
the earliest days of the Victorian Turkish bath, provision was made for
three special categories of bather: hospital patients, the
mentally ill in asylums, and animals, especially cattle and racehorses.
In
1860, Sir John Fife installed the first Turkish bath in an English
hospital at the Newcastle-on-Tyne Infirmary where, according to the
hospital’s annual reports, it remained in use until the end of the
century. And Leared has described how, in 1861, after encouraging
results from trials with 20 phthisis (tuberculosis) patients in the not
yet completed London Hammam, Urquhart installed a Turkish bath at the
Brompton Consumptive Hospital.
The
first recorded use of the Turkish bath in the treatment of mental
illness was also in 1861. Articles describe its tentative use under Dr
Power, resident doctor at the Cork District Lunatic Asylum, and
under Dr Lockhart Robertson at the Sussex County Lunatic Asylum at
Haywards Heath.
By
1864, Dr Bryce was reporting to the Medical Society that,
Every
lunatic asylum in Ireland, several in Scotland, and some in England,
furnish the profession with the means of experimentally testing the
virtues of the bath; and the result herein is, I am assured, uniformly
affirmative. Many civil hospitals also possess them, and now Netley
Military Hospital has provided one.
While
there is, so far, no other evidence to corroborate the spread of the
bath to every asylum in Ireland, it is undoubtedly true that the
Turkish bath was speedily
adopted in many Victorian asylums.
Modern sensibilities may wonder at the means of its experimental
use on the mentally ill. It is clear, however, that the patients
themselves favoured it and, where previously the alternative had been a
hosing down by an attendant, they found the Turkish bath restful and,
perhaps more important, totally unthreatening.
In
1877, Robert Baker installed one at The Retreat in York. Ten years later
this was still being successfully used with a wide range of patients,
both as a curative agent and as a palliative. It may be a significant
factor in patients' acceptance of the Turkish bath that, as in
other hospitals such as the Newcastle Infirmary, the bath was also open
for separate sessions by both nursing staff and members of the public.
The bath at The Retreat cost just under £1,400 to build and somewhere
between nine and eleven shillings per week to heat.
Turkish baths for animals
In 1859,
Robert Wollaston visited St Anne’s Hydropathic Establishment. Noting
that in addition to the patients’ baths (also used by those who
worked at the hydro) and
one
specially erected for the poor of the area, Dr Barter had built special
baths for sick horses, cattle, and dogs from the hydro’s home farm.
Wollaston wrote of
the animals that,
It
is curious to observe with what patience and apparent satisfaction they
endure the process of sudorification. Various diseases incidental to
domestic animals, besides the distemper and epidemics, have been cured
by the hot-air Bath; and I witnessed the curious spectacle of seeing two
horses submitted to the process, with the perspiration rolling off their
bodies, afterwards washed with tepid water, and then groomed or rubbed
down with brushes steeped in cold water. The animals seem always brisk
and gay after the operation.
After
Admiral Rous, steward of the Jockey Club, wrote a much-quoted letter to The
Field in 1860 on the Turkish bath as a means of training, the
use of the Turkish bath became quite popular in racing circles.
Butterfly (winner of the Oaks in 1860) and Kettledrum (winner of the
Derby in 1861) were both trained with the assistance of the Turkish
bath. It was argued that by this means the horse was sweated while at
rest (so that strain on the heart was avoided), and without additional
heavy clothing (so that exposure of the pores to the air cleansed the
system).
Pickfords
the carriers, built a Turkish bath at their horses’ hospital at
Finchley, using one of Constantine’s Convoluted stoves to heat it.
It was used three days each week and,
never
less than twenty horses per week are put into it, undergoing sweating,
washing, and drying again in an out-room.
It is
difficult to imagine today how important horses were to the smooth
running of everday life in the nineteenth century. Simmons has estimated
that even as late as 1913, the twelve largest railway companies alone
were still using around 26,000 horses, mainly in cartage and shunting.
Relatively inexpensive facilities which helped to keep working horses
working and in good health were a good investment.
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