There is a painful tension of the muscles known by the name of spasm or cramp: like other complaints, it may be represented by a scale or ladder, of which the lower bars are slight enough, but the highest bring us to a knowledge of locked jaw, the fistful spasms of Asiatic cholera, of tetanus, of hydrophobia. Heat and moisture are the well-known and popular remedies for this state, and the good woman of the house is always prepared in such cases to recommend hot salt, the tin of hot water, hot flannels, and flannels wrung out of hot water. These remedies are found to be useful, and, being easy of access, are universal: a step above these stands the hot bath, that unready remedy, that, except in public establishments where it is in common use, is scarcely attainable. For the relief of, spasm, the hot bath stands first among our external and simpler remedies; but miserable and wretched indeed is the hot bath by the side of the Turkish Bath. In the hot bath it is a perpetual struggle to keep your balance in the water, to keep the head from going down and the feet from coming up; the head is kept above the water in a temperature different from that of the body, the neck feels cold and damp; the water is constantly varying in temperature; and last of all, you are lifted out of the half-cooled water into the chilly air, to recover your heat in a blanket the best way you can. Perspiration in the hot bath is no sign of the state of the skin; the head seems to perspire, but it is probably nothing more than the condensation of vapour on the skin; the perspiration of the rest of the skin, if it occur at all, is lost in the water of the bath; and in the very outset of the perspiration, perchance, the pores are chilled and a dangerous shock is communicated to the whole frame. Well may Mr. Urquhart exclaim:—"None but a Frank would call a miserable trough of water a bath."
When, years ago, I prescribed for Mr. Urquhart, while he was labouring under a frightful attack of consecutive spasm, a hot bath, he gave me a practical lesson of the uses of heat and moisture, by subjecting himself to a vapour bath of such a degree of intensity and duration as astonished all who saw it. The bath attendant whispered me that he had never seen such a thing before, and relieved himself from responsibility by saying Mr. Urquhart "would have it so." In fact, he had converted the bath-room, for the nonce, into a Turkish Bath. But how miserable, how puny, how inefficient is the hot bath, or the boxed-up vapour bath, to the free, the open, the well-ventilated and well-heated Calidarium! The sufferer from spasm may live in the Calidarium, he may sleep there the whole night and the whole day; he may not only bring his muscular system down to any degree of relaxation that he desire, but he may keep it in that condition for any length of time, or until the disposition to spasmodic tension has entirely passed away.
In a paper entitled "Thermotherapeia; the Heat Cure: or the Treatment of Disease by Immersion of the Body in Heated Air,"[18] I appended the following note as a convenient popular illustration of the action of the Turkish Bath in the relief of muscular spasm. "How many are the instances of spasm which come under the observation of medical men! Spasm of the stomach, of the bowels, of the ducts of the liver and kidneys, of the muscles. How needless to remind my brethren of their infinite variety; of their fearful agony; of our poverty of means for their relief. But here, again, the Turkish Bath cries out emphatically: 'Behold, we bring succour!' Without going more gravely into the matter, let us smile over the paragraph which I have just cut out of the Cork Examiner. As physiologists, we recognise the point and the value of the illustration; as philosophers, we appreciate the lesson, and become the wiser for its gift. 'One day last week, a boy, employed in Messrs. Simpson and Baker's biscuit factory was ascending to a loft, when one of the workmen below called him; and in turning his head quickly to answer the call, he got a crick in the neck of such severity that the head lay almost flat on the shoulder. The poor boy was going home in great agony, when he was met by Mr. Hegarty, the proprietor of the City View Turkish Bath, in the neighbourhood of Blarney, who, on learning what was the matter with him, sent him to take a bath. When the boy was inside about a quarter of an hour, and perspiration had set in, he was placed under a tepid shower-bath, and as soon as the water commenced to fall on him, the neck began to straighten, and in a short time the head had recovered its natural position, to the great delight of the poor lad, and rather to the astonishment of the other parties in the bath, who did not expect so speedy a cure. The boy was still suffering from a pain in the neck; but a second bath the next morning removed that, and he returned to his work immediately.'
"What remedy so potent for that dislocation and spasm of the fibres of the sterno-mastoid as the relaxing warmth of the Calidarium. How many who read this will call to mind hundreds of cases in which its effects to the untaught mind would be equally amazing. We may dare to balance its merits against those of chloroform. We may discover in it a valuable aid in the reduction of dislocations; in the relief of strangulated hernia; or in soothing the wasted pangs of parturition."
CHAPTER IV.
APPLICATION OF THE BATH TO HORSES AND CATTLE, FOR TRAINING, AND THE CURE OF DISEASE.
The Turkish Bath is not only applicable to man, but is suitable also to animals, to the horse and the dog, those faithful and useful friends and companions of man; and also to his oxen, his cows, and his sheep. In the instance of the horse and dog, it is capable of preserving health and condition, and preparing them by training for those feats of strength and speed which are peculiar to those animals. And it becomes an important and valuable medicine in treating their diseases.
In employing the bath as a means of training, we must have clearly before us the powers of the bath, on the one hand, and the precise objects which we wish to attain, on the other. The bath will abstract the old material from the system, and will thereby render the system more ready to take up and more capable of appropriating new and strengthening nutritious matter which may be given to supply its place. In other words, it will do the sweating part of the process excellently, without fatigue, without wear and tear to the economy. But this, although a necessary part of the process of training, is only a part of the process. Other means are required to direct the new nutritive matter to the organs which especially require it—the organs of locomotion; and the principal of these means is exercise. The racehorse must still have his muscles trained by exercise; the prize-fighter, prize-runner, or prize-rower, must still pursue a systematic course of exercise; but the exercise in both instances is only that which is required to educate the muscles, to give them power, precision, facility of action, and to strengthen the breathing function; the exercise for the abstraction of unnecessary matter, for the removal of fat, is no longer requisite; for that the bath will amply and sufficiently provide.