THE VALUE OF BATHING
The daily cold bath is one of the best ways of keeping the doctor at a distance. Cold water has the property of increasing vital work of all kinds. When it is applied to the skin “impulses are sent inward that awaken every organ of the body,” says Kellogg. Let us see what takes place: when a person dips his body into cold water, as in sea bathing, or when he steps into the bath at home, the first thing he does, which in fact he finds himself doing involuntarily, is to draw in a deep breath.
“Oooh-h-h!” he says, but he says it with an indrawing breath. The lungs swell out, the heart begins to pound away with unusually increased vigor and strength, and every part of the system is stimulated. Cold bathing and deep breathing are two valuable things which go inseparably together. The deep breathing increases lung activity, and the lungs bring in more oxygen; the heart circulates the blood with greater force, and hence more and better blood is carried to every tissue of the body. The result is a stirring up of the bodily forces, and a distribution throughout the system of a larger amount of highly vitalized and oxygenated blood.
It has been shown definitely that cold bathing increases enormously the number of white blood corpuscles in the blood. Whether this result is accomplished by the birth of new cells, or by the calling forward of cells from remote parts of the body into the general stream of the blood, is not generally known; but the fact remains that counts of the blood cells taken just before and just after the body has been stimulated by cold water show a decided increase in the army of the warrior cells.
The benefit of sea bathing comes not from the salt in the air or in the water, as some people suppose, but simply from the cold water. The reaction from the dip into the cold water, which is brought about by the blood rushing to the surface to supply the heat which has been taken from it by the application of the water, is one of the most valuable of all curative processes. It is this reaction that sends the blood cells scurrying actively throughout the whole fortress of the body.