The History of Baths

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Bathroom Hydrotherapy Part 3

Professor Crede pleaded for more specific instruction in German universities. He claimed that

“if physicians were better versed in these branches, the field of operation of many quacks would be greatly curtailed.”

Despite dubious medical practises the power of fresh air, water, and the regulation of habits of life without the use of medicine began to take a hold as the Century closed.

“The treatment by water has passed its childhood days, when it still staggered upon feeble limbs, and not infrequently did as much damage as is done by improper medication. Ripened experience and physiological knowledge have fortified the treatment and rendered it safe. Hydrotherapy, combined with diet, may undoubtedly bring about, or aid in, the cure of numberless acute and chronic diseases”.

Schedel, who studied hydrotherapy in Germany, was the first physician to realise the value of cold-water applications as a tonic in tuberculosis. Fleury claimed that cold douches are a reliable substitute for quinine in the treatment of malaria that they are of great value in tuberculosis and anaemia.

In 1839 Engel and Wertheim petitioned the French government for permission to open a hydrotherapy clinic. The petition was addressed to the French Academy of Medicine who appointed a committee, to study the matter. It resulted in a paper which called hydrotherapy

“dangerous, unscientific, chimerical, and opposed to the simplest laws of physiology and pathology,”

Not surprisingly, they were denied permission to open a clinic. Wertheim demanded a clinical trial at a bedside. “

The interest of humanity and medical science demand that a demonstration of the technique and action of hydrotherapy should be made in Paris under the eyes of able physicians .”

In England hydrotherapy has not obtained a foothold among modern physicians, despite the fact that some the most renowned works on the subject emanated from English authors in the latter part of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries. In a discussion of the treatment of fevers in 1895 by the British Medical Society, a general condemnation was meted out to cold baths, because “they are heroic.”

When the author requested the editor of a prominent British medical journal to publish a plea for the more general application of water in disease, in February 1900, this gentleman protested that such a plea was not necessary, because the British literature on this subject was abundant.

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