A room forty-five feet long and twenty broad, with a vaulted ceiling
twenty feet high at the crown, is provided along each of its two
longer sides with a series of marble slabs rising in three tiers from
eighteen inches above the floor to a couple of feet below the
ceiling. The idea may be gained more accurately by supposing three
steps of a giant staircase mounting from an aisle three feet wide
through the middle of the room, back and upward to the parallel
cornice. The level surface of each of these steps is sufficiently wide
to accommodate a man stretched on his back, and the upright portion of
each step is an iron grating. Under the series of steps on both sides
runs a system of sinuous iron pipes pierced with minute holes, and
connected by stop-cocks with a boiler out of sight.
The steps occupy in length twenty-five feet of the room, and its
entire breadth except the narrow aisle between the is occupied by a
tank sunk beneath the floor, sixteen feet square by four and a half
deep, filled with water kept throughout the year at a uniform
temperature of about 70° F., and by the gallery which runs round the
railing of the tank on the floor level. About the sides of the gallery
are arranged hot and cold water-pipes with faucets and hose
connections, the hose being terminated by a spray apparatus similar to
the nose of a watering-pot. Opening off the gallery at the end
furthest from the steps is a small closet fitted up with ascending,
descending, and horizontal shower apparatus, by means of perforated
plates connecting with the water-pipes by faucets set in floor, walls,
and ceiling.
After the battery, the capsicum, and the nux, if Mr. Edgerton can
retain it, we feed him by slow tea-spoonfuls from one-half to a whole
cup of the most concentrated beef-tea--prepared after Lieblg's recipe
or another which I have usually found better relished, and as that,
where food must be administered to fastidious stomachs, is half the
battle, which I prefer. (I will give it hereafter.) Should his stomach
reject it thus administered, it must be given as an enema. Its place
in the plan of all enlightened medical treatment is too lofty to need
my insisting on. We must rely on it at Lord's Island every step of our
way. It will not have been within our patient's system five minutes
before the pulse shows it, nor ten before he feels from head to foot
as if he had taken some powerful and generous stimulant. It is always
wise to give beef-tea, even just before a bath of any kind, and it is
never well to enter the Russian bath on an empty stomach.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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