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The Roman Baths
1:
Prelude
By 1861, small Turkish baths had opened in many
towns and cities around the British Isles, although over a year was to
elapse before large London establishments such as Dr Barter’s Oriental Baths
in Victoria Street or David Urquhart’s Jermyn Street Hammam were completed.
These
early Victorian Turkish baths were built along similar lines. Some
were larger than others, or had additional facilities, but their essential
feature was a series of rooms
heated by hot dry air, each being maintained at a higher temperature than
the previous one. Such dry heat rooms—the tepidarium, the
caldarium, and the laconicum—were found much earlier in the thermae and
balnea of ancient Rome.
In this,
they differed from the Islamic hammams of Turkey in that bathers in the hammam
also washed themselves within the hot rooms
making them humid and steamy, rather than dry.
Even so,
the Victorian hot-air baths were most generally known as Turkish rather than
Roman because it was in Turkey that Urquhart, who re-introduced them
into the British Isles, found them in such widespread use.
But the
Victorian Turkish bath—exemplified perhaps at its best by Urquhart’s Jermyn Street
Hammam, and others modelled on it—were in fact hybrid establishments. They
went back to Roman basics for their dry air hot rooms, their separate washing areas,
and the cold plunge pool, and then added the shampooing and manipulation
(massage) of the Turks, their modesty loincloths, their coffee and
chibouks, and the general ambience of the Turkish hammam.
Urquhart’s use of the term Turkish bath, though he well knew
the bath’s
Roman origins, was quite deliberate. He saw the bath as an effective means
of introducing Turkish culture to the British people as something worthy of
emulation, encouraging a more favourable popular view of Turkey, which in
turn would lead to greater governmental support for Turkey in relation to
its dispute with what Urquhart saw as a power hungry Russian empire.
Not all
advocates of the hot-air bath were agreed on the necessity for such Turkish
additions to the original Roman model, or agreed with Urquhart’s political
aims. Neither were some, usually doctors who saw the Turkish bath as a
medical competitor, happy about the high temperatures to be found in some
establishments where there was no doctor in attendance.
Careful, therefore, not to arouse opposition from the
medical profession, a group—later revealed to include two doctors and a
surgeon—informed the editor of The Lancet that a company was to be
registered for the re-establishment of the Roman bath, which would be better
than the Turkish bath. To reassure medical people, ‘the company would
consult doctors about the most appropriate temperatures so that it is hoped
to hear no more about the injurious consequences of indiscriminate use of
hot-air baths’ raised to temperatures of 150˚F
or even 180˚F.
This
brief announcement gave rise to a correspondence about such matters which
was initiated by Dr John Edward Tilt and lasted several months. Tilt, later
to become President of the Obstetrical Society, wrote that he had taken
Turkish baths in Constantinople, Cairo and Damascus and saw no need for temperatures above 150˚F.
Furthermore, he found that shampooing in those cities had been ‘in the
gentlest, quietest, and most gentle manner possible’ and he protested
against ‘the tremendous energy with which the poor human body is thumped and
battered and crushed’ by some of the shampooers in existing Turkish baths in
Britain.
Three letters supporting the value of the bath
appeared the following week. The first was from Dr Septimus Beardmore,
writing ‘As the promoter of the company to which you referred’. He wished to
wished it to be known that,
… conversation with some of the most eminent
members of the medical profession, as well as personal experience, has
convinced me that the ‘bath,’ to be a success, must be regulated in a
fashion somewhat different from those at present in use. Dr Tilt … has very
properly pointed out that the excessive pommelling in which shampooers vie
with each other is damaging to the bather, and I can assure him that his
suggestion in this respect, as well as the temperature, will receive the
attention of the directors; and I shall be happy to receive from members of
the profession any further suggestions with which they may favour me.
A second letter, also from London, was from a doctor
who signed himself ‘Henry W Kiallmark, Late Surgeon Ottoman Medical Staff,’
who stated that ‘There are two or three points in the management of the bath
to which attention should be directed.’
Instancing the Sultan Mahmoud baths in Constantinople,
he remarked on the ‘considerable amount of vapour, not altogether arising
from the water thrown on the heated floor’ and emphasized, with some
justice, that the importance of good ventilation,
cannot be exaggerated. The
building should be a specially constructed one, with large, airy, domed
chambers, capable of being supplied with a continuous stream of hot air,
well lighted from above, and faced with marble or tiles … No adaptation or
alteration of a private dwelling house will permit of these necessary
arrangements.
But there was no suggestion that such
specially constructed buildings were exactly
the kind of facility which the Roman Bath Company, of which he was a
director, was intending to build.
2. The Company
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