Victorian Turkish baths
Two people were primarily responsible for the introduction of the Victorian Turkish bath into the 19th century's United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland: Scottish diplomat and sometime MP for Stafford, David Urquhart (1805–1877),[22] and Irish physician and hydropathist (an early hydrotherapist), Richard Barter (1802–1870),[23] founder and proprietor of St Ann(e)'s Hydropathic Establishment near Blarney, Co. Cork.
Believing that a higher temperature increased the curative effectiveness of the bath, he invited Urquhart to St Ann's, offering him 'land, workmen, and materials',[26] to help him build one for his patients.
On his return, based on what he learned in Rome and the plans and details he brought back,[28] he built a bath at St Ann's differing from the traditional Islamic hammam in the dryness of the heated air.
After Ironside had, at Urquhart's suggestion, visited St Ann's for his own health, the paper, and its later London version The Free Press, also acted (from 29 March 1856) as a means of communication about Turkish baths.
She agreed that the bath at Riverside, their home near Rickmansworth, should be open to all who wished to try it, whether they were his servants, friends or neighbours, local doctors with their patients, FACs wanting information, or their members who were unwell.
The earliest newspaper account so far found suggests that the first of these was built in part of the home of a former collier, Daniel Jones, who made his bath available to locals suffering from rheumatism and infections of the chest.
[55] But a couple of months later there is a long account of a visit to the Turkish bath at an unnamed location in Brecon, staffed by a Mr Davies and owned by a Dr Williams who is described as 'the pioneer in the Principality'.
[58] In 1858, Dr John Le Gay Brereton, father of the Australian poet and critic of the same name, was visiting physician at the FAC Turkish baths in Bradford's Leeds Road,[59] one of the first in England.
David Urquhart's influence was also felt outside the Empire when in 1861, Charles H Shepard opened the first Turkish baths in the United States at 63 Columbia Street, Brooklyn Heights, NY, most probably on 3 October 1863.
In his annual report for 1864, Dr Bolton stated that after a three-year trial the new air circulation system was 'superior in every respect' to the methods previously used, that the Turkish bath had been favourably received by the medical profession, and that it would soon be adopted by hospitals, asylums, and workhouses generally.
Nevertheless, large city hospitals in Belfast, Denbigh, Dublin, Huddersfield, Liverpool and London followed suit installing Turkish baths, the most recent being at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh in 1900.
'[137] In England, the Medical Superintendent of the Sussex District Lunatic Asylum at Haywards Heath, Dr Charles Lockhart Robertson, was, like Power, a member of the Medico-Psychological Association (later, the Royal College of Psychiatrists).
Even before it was completely finished, he included a plan and description of it in a review of Erasmus Wilson's book The Eastern, or Turkish bath which he was writing for the Journal of Mental Science.
[140] Concerned that the asylum's board would be wary of an expensive new facility which catered for only a few patients, Urquhart proposed a large bath costing £500 based, for ease of supervision, on the plan of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon prison.
Yet fifteen years passed after the installation of Power's Turkish bath in the Cork Asylum before The Retreat followed suit, although its Superintendent, Dr John Kitching, was also a member of the Medico-Psychological Association.
Kitching eventually wrote a paper proposing the installation of a Turkish bath, arguing that provision for a life in which monotony and ennui were reduced to a minimum would, in time, be considered, 'as effectually parts of the treatment of the insane, as the taking of medicine.
'[147] But it was his successor, Dr Robert Baker, who worked with the Retreat's architect, Edward Taylor, in bringing to fruition the plan recommended by the sub-committee set up to consider Kitching's proposal.
This was designed in a Scottish Baronial style by architects Lockwood and Mawson,[158] making them the first major architectural practice to build a Turkish bath in England, and preparing them for those they later built at Saltaire and Keighley.
At Ben Rhydding, Macleod's choice of the gentler Ling's massage and the use of lower temperatures than those preferred by his predecessors, together with his later ending of the temperance regime normal at hydros,[28]: pp.104–105 softened the rigour which predominated at the first establishments.
Halfway between the two aisles was a decorative fountain and, two-thirds of the way along the hall, 'like a Black Mass chancel screen, a wall of wandering stained glass reptiles lit up from within'[164] divided the first part of the room, the frigidarium, from the tepidarium beyond.
Other extras included iron, sulphur, soda, seaweed or iodine baths, and it was claimed that the saline spa waters were 'most efficacious in all cases of relaxed throats, bronchitis, and consumption'.
Double doors and a short curtained passageway led to the large square tepidarium, with its 20-foot (6.1 m) high domed ceiling pierced with 'Moorish' star-shaped stained-glass openings and, at the centre of its tiled floor, a shallow octagonal pool fed by a small decorative fountain.
The main London clubhouse was designed in the Beaux Arts tradition by the Anglo-French partnership of Charles Mewès (1858–1914) and the Englishman, Arthur Joseph Davis (1878–1951), architects of The Ritz Hotel, which had opened in nearby Piccadilly five years earlier.
[173] Sports facilities in the basement include a modern gym, squash courts, the Victorian-style Turkish baths, treatment rooms, and the full-sized Pompeian-style swimming pool.
Passengers on the Titanic were looked after by a team of three men (J B Crosbie, W Ennis, and L Taylor) none of whom was to survive the voyage, and two women (Annie Caton and Mrs Maud Slocombe), both of whom were more fortunate.
Stimulating and therapeutic, the jets were sprayed onto the bathers following their Turkish bath, after which they were helped to dry off, returned to their cubicle, covered with towels, and told to relax prior to their massage.
[28–29] The modern shower had jets of hot or icy cold water, and the shampooing room was fitted with two up-to-date tables with chrome surrounds and a two-inch armoured glass surface.
The Victorian Turkish bath offered personal cleansing opportunities, usage as a therapy,[191][192] (especially for complaints such as rheumatism[193] and gout), and a leisure activity for those with money and time enough to take advantage of it.
The increasing effectiveness of drugs as painkillers and (following World War II) as curative agents, together with an exponential growth in medical knowledge, had virtually ended the use of the Turkish bath as a therapy.
[200] J Hatchard Smith's 1882 Dalston Junction Turkish Baths, one of the very few where the exterior was designed to give the impression of a hammam or a mosque, was destroyed in a fire barely eight years after it opened.
