The eastern or Turkish bath

by Sir Erasmus Wilson

The structure of the skin—with its drainage tubes requiring a free exit; its streams of blood seeking for oxygen from the air; its nerves demanding the contact and stimulus of the atmosphere—obviously points to the relation which should subsist between man and the external world—to the fact that his natural and intended state is one of nakedness. Certain portions of the skin, in different parts of the world and among different nations, are commonly exposed to the air as Nature doubtless intended the whole body to be. Our faces and hands; in women, the neck, and often the shoulders; among the Highlanders, the lower limbs; these portions of the body are naked, are unblushingly exposed; and, as we all know, without inconvenience. Who ever feared to take cold because his hands and his face were open to the free air of Heaven? What lady ever complained of inconvenience resulting from her décolleté shoulders at an evening party or the opera, or even from the bitter draughts of night air that frequently close those entertainments? Who ever heard of a Highlander suffering from rheumatism in the knees? That charming friend and companion of our youthful dreams, Miss Jane Porter, who was always taking colds from the slightest exposure of her skin to the air, once said to her brother, who was a physician,—"How I wish that my skin were all face?" "Try and make it all face," was his reply. And she partially succeeded; but for complete success she wanted the knowledge of the Turkish Bath.

The bath has the property of hardening and fortifying the skin, so as to render it almost insusceptible to the influence of cold. The feeling after quitting the Calidarium is one of defiance of cold; the bather has a longing for the cool air of the outer world, and with no other covering than his cotton mantle, a lawn or a terrace would be his chosen resort if the opportunity were within his reach. In the hands of Mr. Urquhart, the bath has presented us with one remarkable instance of the power of endurance of the skin developed by its aid. A fine, athletic child of five years old has been brought up in the bath, and has never worn other clothes than a loose linen garment. He is a sturdy little fellow, with the independence of deportment of an Indian and the symmetry of an Apollo. He was met one wintry day, when the snow was on the ground, walking in the garden, perfectly naked. "Do you feel cold?" inquired his interlocutor. "Cold!" said the boy, touching his skin doubtfully with his finger, "yes, I think I do feel cold." That is, he felt cold to his outward touch, but not to his inward sensations, and it required that he should pass his finger over the surface of his body as he would have done over a marble statue to be sure, not that he was cold, for that he was not, but to be convinced that his surface felt cold.

That the skin of man can support the temperature of a climate such as that of Britain, when trained to it from the cradle, is perfectly clear; our forefathers, the ancient Britons, wore no clothes. The Roman invaders of Britain tell us of the "naked savages of Scotland." The inhabitants of the Tierra del Fuego at Cape Horn, a country colder than Britain, have no other clothing than a hide which they hang on their windward shoulder; and their children may be seen, perfectly naked, gambolling on the sea-shore, and scrambling in the bottoms of the boats that come off to the passing ships. The mother of the little Apollo I have already described called the attention of a friend to the warmth of her infant's feet, and with the remark, "While my old nurse was with me, the child's feet were always cold, because she insisted upon covering them up with socks; but now that I leave them exposed to the air, they are constantly warm."

I need scarcely say more to prove that the bath gives endurance, and that endurance fortifies the individual against a very prevalent cause of disease in this climate—namely, colds and affections of the chest and lungs. A Doctor of Divinity whom I frequently met in Mr. Witt's Bath, told me that during the winter-time he was scarcely ever free from colds, often so severe as to lay him up for several weeks, and that he also suffered from attacks of neuralgia; but that, since he had adopted the use of the bath twice a week, all disposition to colds and neuralgia had ceased; and, for the first time in sixteen years, he had passed the winter without a cold.

It is impossible, therefore, to avoid the conclusion that the close clothing of the body from the moment of birth, and the continuance of the process throughout our lives, must tend to prevent the proper and healthy development of the skin and also to debilitate it; and that the opposite course, of exposing the skin to the air, and promoting its natural functions by means of the bath, must have the contrary effect of hardening and strengthening the skin and rendering its functions more perfect.

In the bath we learn to distinguish by the eye and by the touch, the weak and the strong, the unhealthy and the healthy skin; we find the former pale, soft, flabby, wrinkled, sordid, starved, and morbidly sensitive; while the latter is pink, hard, firm, elastic, smooth, clear, sensible, and well nourished. When the fingers are drawn forcibly over the skin of the practised bather, the white streaks caused by the pressure are instantly restored to their pink hue when the pressure is relaxed; the sanguineous stream seems to follow the pressure like a surge and instantly obliterates its effects; and the skin recoils with a snap like India-rubber when it is pulled away from the body and suddenly released. In the bath there are no wrinkles and no decrepit age; the skin becomes firm and elastic; it recovers its colour and its smoothness; it fits close to the muscular frame beneath, instead of falling away from it in grim festoons; its hues are selected from the palette of youth. But this is not all: as the skin regains its health, the hair returns upon the scalp of the bald; and white hairs which have crept untimely and unbidden among the dark locks of mid-age, shrink away from the sight, and seek a more suitable and more unwholesome roost.

But these visual appearances of the skin, which obviously indicate its unhealthy external characters, also denote a deficient and imperfect circulation of the blood; a deteriorated sensibility; a defective cell-formation and secretion; an exhausted tone and vigour.

In respect of one of these qualities—namely, healthy sensibility of the skin—I met in the bath with a curious and unexpected illustration. When I was invited by Mr. Stewart Rolland to pass from his Calidarium at a temperature of 170°, into his Laconicum, in which the actual temperature was 190°, but the sensible temperature some degrees higher, in consequence of the presence of watery vapour, I was suddenly made aware that the skin of my body had lost its power of appreciating the higher degrees of heat, and that my face and hands were my only reliable monitors of the actual elevation of the temperature.

To the face and hands the temperature was for a moment almost scalding, but my body was sensible of no inconvenience. Had I been asked, before I made this experiment, what part of the body would have suffered most from the extreme heat, I should have said, the skin of the trunk of the body, because this is naturally the most sensitive from being covered and protected by clothing; but I was unprepared to find the real fact in the very reverse of this—to learn that the skin of the trunk of the body had lost its power of sensibility; in other words, had become partially paralysed from disuse of its proper functions.

In a word, the habit of clothing the body, of keeping it shut in from the air and from the light, weakens the nerves of the skin and consequently the natural and healthy sensibility of the organ. Although I could not appreciate the extreme heat of Mr. Rolland's Laconicum, I should have suffered acutely from a scratch, a pinch, or a blow on the bare skin: but the habit of the bath would reverse this unnatural sensitiveness, the skin would learn to appreciate truly instead of mendaciously; and blows, or pinches, or external injury, unless very severe, would cease to be felt as an inconvenience or an annoyance. The little boy bred in the bath complains of no hurt when he is accidentally struck or when he tumbles; and that which would be punishment to another boy is none to him. This, we see, must be the natural state of the skin, otherwise the Indian could no more exist without clothes than the lobster without his shell.