The Tepid Bath

The Tepid Bath (temperature 700 to 8oo) is suitable for those whose health, or sensitiveness to cold, forbids the use of the cold bath. The same rules, however, apply, especially as regards the delicate in health.

The Hot Bath

The Hot Bath(temperature 980 to 110°) differs from the cold or tepid bath, inasmuch as they are preservative of health, while this is curative of disease.

It opens the pores of the skin, relaxes the muscles, soothes the nervous system, and (after its first stimulation of the heart's action is past) is a valuable agent in reducing fever and inflammatory action by the profuse perspiration that it induces - so much so, that it is often an efficacious remedy in the treatment of inflammation.

In the convulsions of infancy, the hot bath, continued from five to ten minutes, is an important part of the treatment.

In order to avoid any possible risk of the sudden immersion in hot water, it is a safe plan to have the bath at about 950 to begin with, and gradually raise the temperature to 100°, or even 1050 if profuse perspiration afterwards be desired; in this case, the bath may be continued by an adult twenty minutes or half an hour. On coming out of the bath, after rapidly wiping the surface of the body, a warm blanket should be wrapped round before getting into a warm bed.

When it is desirable to give a hot bath to a child for any febrile malady, or in any case where the child would be frightened at being put into the water, its fears may be disarmed by covering the bath with a blanket, and letting the little patient down gently into the bath.

Vapour Bath

Vapour Bath(100° to 1200) is of great use in exciting perspiration in catarrh, in simple fever, and in rheumatism. It may be extemporized by sitting on a chair enclosed in a blanket, and having a pail of hot water placed under the chair, adding to the water some red-hot stones, or brick, or iron chain. If a long pipe can be connected with the spout of a large kettle, and made to pass within the blanket, it affords a ready means of making a vapour bath.

Hot-Air Bath

(Temperature 100° to 1200.) This acts in the same way as a vapour bath. It is readily made by burning some spirits of wine under the canopy of blanket. A convenient mode is, after the patient is seated and covered up to the throat with blanket, to place an ounce of spirits of wine in a cup, the cup standing in a basin with some water, then light the spirit and let it burn out.

The Turkish Bath

The Turkish Bath, a combination of these, is useful in rheumatic and other chronic diseases, but requires to be used for medical purposes only under medical advice.

Hydropathy professes the cure of disease by baths of various kinds. It can only be properly practised in establishments especially devoted thereto. It is expensive, and therefore only within the reach of comparatively few.