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The Victorian Turkish bath has
already been defined on our home page as follows:
Turkish
bath n. 1. a type of bath in which the bather
sweats freely in a room which is heated by a continuous flow of
hot dry air (or in two or three such rooms at progressively
higher temperatures), followed by a full body wash (sometimes
preceded by a cold plunge), then by a massage, and finally by a
period of relaxation in a cooling-room.
2. (sometimes pl.) an establishment offering
Turkish baths.
This emphasis on hot
dry
air may seem surprising to those who have read travellers' accounts of 19th
century establishments in Turkey, or who have themselves visited hammams in
present day Turkey.
For the hot air in such
establishments is not only humid, but often actually steamy, while the floors
are frequently covered in water.
There is, of course, nothing
specifically Turkish about the so-called 'Turkish bath', any more than there is
a unique type of English bath or American bath. It was those (mainly
European) 19th century travellers who first came across public hot-air baths and
Islamic hammams in the Ottoman Empire who labelled them Turkish—this despite
their widespread existence in the Maghreb and wherever else there was, or had been, a
Moorish or Islamic influence. But the hot-air bath did not originate in the
Islamic hammam; it had been in use in Sparta (and probably even earlier) and
reached its zenith in Rome after the development of the hypocaust.
The original dry heat bath, which was
so important a part of the
Roman thermae, survived only in the Eastern Roman Empire (the Christians in the
west seeming to feel that if cleanliness was next to godliness, it was
just as well to keep it a
long way behind). Other parts of the Roman bathing process included massage (which
continued in the hammam) and naked bathing in hot and cold pools (which was
firmly
rejected by Islam).
These pools,
close to, but separate from, the hot rooms of the Roman thermae were
replaced by washing facilities and, later, by decorative fountains which
found their way into both hot rooms and cooling areas. Inevitably, the combination
of hot air and cold water turned the original dry heat into the misty, steamy
atmosphere of the hammam which is still to be found in Turkey today or, closer
to hand, in the north African owned hammams behind the Gare du Nord in Paris.
The Victorian Turkish bath, on
the other hand, though it aimed to reproduce the effect and, often also, the
ambience of the hammams in Turkey, had to be re-created experimentally. In
1856, David Urquhart and Dr Richard Barter initially worked together at St Ann's
hydro, near Cork, to try to create the first hot-air bath to be built in the
kingdom since Roman times.
Barter
soon realised that for the bath to have a therapeutic effect, the
temperature had to be as high as possible, and that the body is able
to tolerate much higher temperatures if the air is dry. Urquhart, was
not immediately conscious of how humid the Turkish baths had been, but
later he admitted that when he had originally written the text of the
chapters in The Pillars of Hercules, ‘ I
had then but most imperfectly apprehended the value of HOT
AIR, to which, as distinguished from vapour, the Turkish bath owes
its peculiar excellence.’
Thereafter
the aim of most Victorian Turkish baths designers was to ensure that
the hot air was maintained in as dry a state as possible. Initially,
there was much disagreement between doctors as to whether the bath
should be dry or wet. There was considerable correspondence in the
medical press and elsewhere at the beginning of the 1860s as to
whether hot or dry air was better, but by the middle of the decade hot
dry air was the generally agreed standard. (This correspondence is
treated in more detail in
The Hot air controversy’ in the
History Section
of this website)
As
mentioned in the introduction, the Germans did not use the term
Turkish baths but usually called them, rather more accurately
Irish-Roman baths as a tribute to Dr Barter. These are the baths which
form the subject of this website and which are here called Victorian
Turkish baths.
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