Human bake oven

The idea for the human bake oven came from the knowledge that heat was useful in alleviating pain, something that had been known since antiquity and had previously been employed in medicine through treatments such as mustard plasters.

[2] The human bake oven was the result of work carried out by the engineers Thomas Henry Rees, Evelyn Sheffield and Lewis A. Tallerman in the late 1890s.

The idea for the bake oven was thought out independently by both Rees and Sheffield, who pondered how hot dry air could be used for medical treatment.

[1][5] It was reported on 12 January 1895 that the human bake oven also successfully passed a trial at the North-West London Hospital without "a single failure", succeeding in treating cases of rheumatism, sprains, gout, a chronic leg ulcer and a tuberculous knee-joint.

A pamphlet published by W. B. Northrop in September that year, titled The Baking Cure, praised the machine as "the latest thing in American medical science" (misattributing its invention to a Mr. Sprague of Rochester, New York).

[3] The human bake oven resembled an iron lung in appearance, consisting of a large metal cylinder and wooden extensions at both sides for the head and feet, respectively.

[6] Some patients reportedly began feeling that they were being roasted alive and experienced their hearts thumping rapidly while undergoing treatment in bake ovens.