THERA PEUTIC BATH S. As regards detergenee, the Vapor Bath is the only kind of bath that is really effectual. If the skin is exposed to the action of hot water-vapor, the scurf becomes soft ened and loosened, and is more easy to remove by simple rubbing. In the vapor-bath, as in the Turkish bath, in which dry heat is used, the person is cooled by having tepid or cold water dashed upon him. The vapor-bath is useful in certain diseases of the skin and kidneys, as well as in chronic rheumatism. Its temperature is usually over 99° F.
The cold sponge-bath is useful as a daily tonic to most people. It is a stimulant to nutrition, circulation, and nerve-action. It should be brief and followed by brisk friction with the towel. By exhausted, and generally by aged, as well as by thin, nervous, and sensitive cold baths should lie avoided, and tepid ones taken instead. A bath in the sea is productive of good in most eases in persons of good physique. In typhoid the cold bath has lowered 'the mo• tality from about IS per cent. to about 5 per cent. Wrapping a patient in a wet sheet, and then covering with a blanket (the 'wet pack'), is sometimes substituted for the cold bath. The hot bath is stimulant, relieving pain and limit ing inflammation, controlling convulsions, and inducing sleep. It is useful also in some dis eases by causing sweating. At sanitariums and bathing establishments, salt-rubs, eleetro-chem ical, eleetro-thermal, and other baths are given. The Roman. Bath consists of an application of oil or vaseline, with massage.
A Bath is one in which some sub stance intended to act as a medicine has been mixed with the liquid. This is an ancient and almost obsolete method of bringing remedies to bear upon the system. The mineral substances used were common salt, chloride of lime, nitric acid, corrosive sublimate, the hydroxides and carbonates of sodium and potassium, ashes, soap, iodine, sulphur, iron, etc.; the vegetable were
wine, vinegar, solutions of essential oils, infu sions of thyme, rosemary, lavender, wormwood, willow, oak, and Peruvian bark, etc. Such animal substances as milk, blood, bouillon of meat, etc., are also sometimes employed for baths, with a view to imparting nourishment, but that any is taken up into the system is denied. Mercurial Baths are used in syphilis. They are haths in which vapor of mercury is ap plied to the whole surface excepting the nead. The application must be made in a fumigating box, in which the body alone is inclosed along with the vapor, in order that the respiratory organs may not be incommoded. Another species of vapor baths is what is called an Animal Bath, which was used by the ancients, and was in great reputation in eases of lameness. Either the whole body of the patient was wrapped in the skin of a newly slaughtered animal, or an open ing was made, and the diseased limb inserted into the breast or belly of the animal while yet alive, or into the newly drawn blood. Some times smaller animals were killed, split up, and immediately applied to the diseased part. Of Gas _Baths, the most generally used are those of sulphureted hydrogen and carbonic-acid gas, which are to be had at certain mineral springs. In recent times, at Isehl and other places, the vapors that arise from the mineral springs loaded with saline particles are received in close rooms, in which the patients walk about and allow the vapors to act upon the lungs and skin. See BATH-HOUSES, MUNICIPAL; and HYDRO THERAPY.
The terms water-bath and sand-bath have been adopted in chemistry to signify a contrivance by which vessels are heated without being brought into immediate contact with the flame, hut receive their heat through the medium of hot water or sand.