“The person about to take the bath puts the apparatus ready for use under the chair, and placing the cloak lightly over the hoop, sits down, slips the two ends of the hoop together, draws the cloak round, tying it down the front with the strings provided, and adjusting it round the neck, may take the bath comfortably from fifteen to forty minutes, according to inclination.”
But it is possible that the bather may prefer to recline while enjoying this calming and luxuriant bath. This is easily done, and if the reader will glance at Plate Two, he will see the modus operandi. Nothing could be more simple, nothing more effective.
We are not, however, the first to have discovered the merits of Messrs Allen’s luxurious invention. It is in general use now all over the country, and medical men are constantly in the habit of recommending the bath to their patients. So also is the professional press, and among these such well-known Journals as “The London Medical Record”; “The Medical Times and Gazette”; “The Medical Examiner”; “The Medical Press and Circular”; “The Lancet”; and “The British Medical Journal” are loud in their praises of the apparatus.
It will be especially observed by the intelligent reader that Allen’s bath may be used entirely as a dry hot air bath, or as a mixed hot air and vapour bath. Well, this in our opinion is a capital idea, because one can use it as either. We, ourselves, perspire freely, and therefore use only the hot air, but as Sir Erasmus says: “The great purpose to be arrived at, so far as temperature is concerned, is to obtain one which shall be agreeable to the sensations.”
The following is what Messrs Allen and Sons write me themselves concerning their bath:—
“Our idea is, that the hot air and vapour bath combined is the truest approach to the Eastern Turkish bath, in which, after the bather has been in the heated room some little time, and begins to feel somewhat oppressed, they (the attendants) come round, sprinkle the heated floor with water; this produces a vapour, and it is almost immediately after this that the body begins to perspire freely, the vapour also relieves the breathing very much with some. There are those who will not perspire in the hot-air bath at all, but do with the hot-air and vapour bath, which, mingling with the hot-air, produces a moist heat, softens the skin, and produces perspiration much more quickly.”
There is one advantage which the portable bath possesses over the regular sanatorium Turkish:—the head is not covered, it is not in the heated atmosphere, and therefore purer air can be breathed, although both face and scalp perspire as freely as any other part of the body.
The head, however, may be covered if this is thought more pleasant.
Dr L.E. Turner, it would seem believes in having the head exposed during the bath.