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1:
Background
to the controversy
The discovery that
was lost and has been found again, is this, in the fewest possible
words: The application of hot air to the human body. It is not wet
air, nor moist air, nor vapoury air; it is not vapour in any shape
or form whatever. It is an immersion of the whole body in hot common
air.
When Dr J L W
Thudichum thus described the Turkish bath to members of the Medical
Society, in London on 28 January 1861, he may, to some, have seemed
to be unduly stressing its dryness.
But while the hot air bath,
newly arrived in London, was fashionably known as a Turkish bath—the
subject of his lecture—Thudichum was reminding his listeners that in
reality it was derived, though altered by passage of time and change
of purpose, from the hot air bath of the Romans.
He was also providing support for Dr Richard
Barter who, in Ireland, had been under attack by enemies of the type
of hot air bath that he was then building across the island.
For, once converted to the value of the
Turkish bath by David Urquhart's The Pillars of Hercules,
Barter immediately set about the task of solving the technical
problems necessary to provide them effectively.
To this end he
sent his architect nephew, Mr Richard Barter, to Rome to look at the
remains of the early Roman baths and report back. Because he went
back to first principles, Dr Barter wished to emphasise the Roman
origins of his hot-air baths and advertised them as 'The Improved
Turkish, Or Roman Baths'.
Urquhart knew, of course, that the bath dated
from the time of the Romans (or even earlier). But he had discovered
it as a living institution in north Africa and in the Ottoman
Empire. Furthermore, it was a perfect example of living Turkish
culture—an attitude to cleanliness far superior to contemporary
western practice—which he could add to his armoury of weapons aimed
at helping change British governmental attitudes to Turkey and
garner political support for it at the expense of Russia.
Urquhart was a man of limited financial means
pursuing, at this time, joint goals of changing British foreign
policy and preaching the value of the Turkish bath. The two goals
were brought together by his encouraging members of his
foreign
affairs committees to build and run (small) Turkish baths.
He hoped by this means to enable them to
support their families while giving them more time for political work,
and a place to hold political meetings.
Not until 1862 was he able to gather enough support to build a major
Turkish bath in Jermyn Street—the London Hammam.
Barter, on the other hand, already had a
successful hydropathic establishment providing, with his estate, a
good income. The energy and speed with which he solved many of the
technical problems of the bath, and the number of Turkish baths he
built round Ireland between 1857 and 1860, contrasted sharply with
the practical results which Urquhart had been able to achieve.
But if Urquhart had numerous political
opponents with whom he continually crossed swords, Barter, with less
reason, soon found his success gave rise to jealousy and bitter
attacks. Some of these came from 'traditional' hydropathists for
whom the cold water cure of Priessnitz was the be all and end all of
hydropathy. Barter was no less a hydropathist, but believed that the
cold water cure was not always the most effective treatment and had
earlier roused the ire of the traditionalists by installing a vapour
bath at St Ann's.
So it was that at the start of the year 1860, Dr Barter and
his supporters became involved in a major controversy over the 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, and soon
occupied the correspondence columns of newspapers, sporting papers
and medical journals in England.
2.
The start of the row
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