Turkish and Other Baths: A Guide to Good Health and Longevity

Оглавление

Stables Gordon. Turkish and Other Baths: A Guide to Good Health and Longevity

Preface

Chapter One. The Skin – Its Uses and Great Importance in the Animal Economy

Chapter Two. How to Maintain the Skin in Health

Chapter Three. The Luxury of the Turkish Bath – Its Uses and Physiological Action – The Ailments it Tends to Cure

Chapter Four. The Turkish Bath: In Theory and Practice – The Portable Turkish Bath

Chapter Five. The Turkish Bath – Continued. The Traveller’s Bath

Chapter Six. On the Uses of the Various Medicated Baths

Chapter Seven. The Ordinary Home Baths – Seaside Bathing

Отрывок из книги

Apart from any consideration of the bath as a remedial measure, in cases of disease, its importance as an agent for preserving the health, and granting to those who use it judiciously a reasonable hope of long life, cannot easily be over-estimated. But in order to understand properly the beneficial action of baths on the system, we must have some little knowledge of the physiology of the skin. Without such knowledge, all arguments that we could adduce in favour of the constant use of the bath in some shape or form, would be of the post hoc propter hoc kind, and therefore of little value.

What, then, we may ask, are the uses of the skin, for what ends has Nature designed it, and what is its modus operandi? Briefly stated, the uses of the skin are as follows: – Firstly, it covers and protects from violence the surface of the whole body, and the various tender and sensitive parts that lie immediately beneath it; secondly, it is the organ of touch; thirdly, it is the great regulator of the heat of the body; fourthly, it performs the duties of a great emunctory, and by means of its millions of sudoriferous, or sweat glands, each with its efferent duct; it carries off and out of the body a vast quantity of effete matter, which, if retained in the blood, would poison it, and therefore unfit it for the healthful performance of its functions; fifthly, the skin acts as an absorbent; and, sixthly, it is to some extent an organ of respiration.

.....

Nor can the intelligent reader be unaware that the nutrient portion of the food we eat, after undergoing the process of digestion performed in the mouth – where it is masticated and mingled with the solvent saliva – in the stomach, where it is reduced by muscular action, and the gastric juices to the pulp called chyme – in the upper portions of the intestines – where it receives the secretions of liver and pancreas and becomes chyle, is collected by a series of absorbent vessels which unite at last to form the thoracic duct, or grand chyle canal, which empties itself of its valuable contents directly into one of the largest veins in the body, and is thus mingled with the general circulation. He knows, too, that the pure life-giving arterial blood, which, rushing onwards from that mighty force-pump, the heart, is distributed to every atom of the system, returns at last laden with the used up particles of the tissues; that, in fact, a constant change is going on in the system, a constant deposit of new matter, a constant discharge of old. And that the dark venous blood, containing the effete matter, rushes through the lungs, therein to be spread out, and chemically united to the oxygen of the air that we breathe, before it is again pumped out towards the tissues to supply them with heat and life. But it must not be forgotten, that not the lungs only, but the kidneys, the liver, and the spleen have each and all of them their duties to perform towards the blood; and last, but not least, that the skin, when in a state of health, assists them in no small degree in performing their several functions.

But there are other glands which receive assistance from the skin in the performance of their duties. We refer to those distributed here and there in the frame-work of the body, notably in the axilla, the groin, and under the skin of the neck, and whose functions are to purify, in some way or other, the matter collected by a series of vessels called the lymphatics, before it is again applied to the purposes of nutrition.

.....