The Turkish Bath, Its Design and ConstructionAllsop, Robert Owen
Science
The Turkish Bath, Its Design and Construction
Allsop, Robert Owen
Baths, Turkish
There are, of course, many expedients for producing perspiration by
heated air much simpler than by the special construction of a suite of
bath rooms; but as they will be familiar to all studying the subject of
baths, I will pass them over here as mere makeshifts. For although there
is something to be said in their favour, in that the head is free and
one can breathe cooler air, there are serious objections to their use,
as the lamps employed _burn the air_, and there is also an absence of
that rapid aërial circulation which is so much to be desired. Besides
the actual objections to their use, more or less inconvenience attends
the employment of the sheet and lamp (or cabinet and lamp) baths, and
there is little of the luxury of a true sudatorium about the
extemporised bath, admirable as it may be as a hydropathic expedient.
The bath in the house may consist of one of the following
arrangements:--(1) A single room used as a sudatory chamber and for
washing; (2) a hot room and a washing room; (3) a combined hot room and
washing room, and a cooling room; (4) a cooling room, washing room, and
hot room; or (5) a suite of chambers of such extent as to provide every
possible luxury, such as even the old Roman gentlemen would have
coveted. Where there is no second room the bather must use his bed room
as a cooling and reposing room, as he must also in the cases where only
a washing room and a hot room are provided.
[Illustration: FIG. 22.
Plan of Mr. Urquhart's Small Private Bath and of the Hot Room at Sir
Erasmus Wilson's Bath at Richmond Hill.]
For a simple sudatory chamber, where washing operations are also
conducted, all that is required is a room with brick walls and fire- and
heat-proof floor and ceiling, with an adjoining lobby, a flue to conduct
smoke from a simple stove, and a sunk washing tank or _lavatrina_.
Allowance must be made for a couch opposite the stove. Fig. 22 (A)
shows the simplest form of a bath room possible; it is that which Mr.
Urquhart constructed, and has described in his 'Manual of the Turkish
Bath.' It was erected by him to show how cheaply an effective bath room
might be built, the whole arrangement, with water fittings and building
of three of its walls, only costing 37_l._
The room or rooms forming the Turkish bath in a private house should be
cut off by a lobby from the other apartments of the house, with
carefully-fitting self-closing doors at either end; and in the case of
an elaborate bath, another little lobby with double doors and heavy
curtains, should be placed between the cooling room and the two bathing
rooms, as at Fig. 24. The air of the hot rooms should, of course, be
perfectly and absolutely cut off from that of the house.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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