The exoticism of a Turkish bath so appealed to the Victorians that it became the height of fashion from the s onwards. Today we enjoy Council operated hot pools and the luxury of spas and hot tubs in our homes. We owe their existence to the development of the Victorian Turkish Bath Movement and the entrepreneurial spirit of some early Cantabrians who created businesses out of cleanliness.
We fear that a good many of us are too busy to be as clean as could be wished, and at any rate, whether we are so or no, it will be granted that except for the wealthier classes the facilities for a really good wash are not so ample as they ought to be. Bodily cleanliness is more conducive to mental cleanliness than we are apt at all times to remember; it has, moreover, such an intimate connection with the hearty action of the liver and consequently of the whole temper of the man that it must be regarded as a social and political agent for the removal of vice and the promotion of virtue.
We shall therefore be well content to see a good swimming bath established, with some warm baths attached, for the benefit of people arriving from the country, or from the unwatered town and the perspiration hills of Lyttelton.
We have already said enough, and more than enough. The reported curative powers of Turkish Baths were well circulated. According to Doctor Power, the resident physician of the Cork District Lunatic Asylum in , it was a proven cure for insanity. Edited from writings b y David Urquhart, the Scottish diplomate who had introduced the Turkish Bath to Britain, it also discussed the effects of the Turkish bath on the muscular power of runners, wrestlers, boxers and racehorses, through to mothers in childbirth and milk production.
Turkish baths could also aid in the cure of consumption tuberculosis which spread rapidly through the community taking the lives of old and young alike. Scottish physician Dr. Burgess contended in that climate had little or nothing to do with the cure of consumption and that if it had, the curative effects would be produced through the skin and not the lungs, by opening the pores and promoting a better reaction of the blood.
