Note 16 — THE TURKISH BATH.1

It must not be supposed that we seek here to advocate the Turkish bath as a better means of maintaining health than that of exercise to perspiration,16 the means ordained by nature for promoting a healthy activity of all the functions of life: no—we can never improve on the laws of nature, which have been pre-eminently adapted by a beneficent Providence, for the accomplishment of their specific ends: it is only when those laws have been outraged and neglected by the “over-working-brain and under-working-body” habits of a 19th century, that art steps in, in the shape of the Turkish bath, and proposes to produce those beneficial effects on the system, without injury to it, which nature had meant to be produced by active exercise. The Turkish bath is, in short, an antidote for the unwholesome lives we live,17—a peace-offering to outraged nature for our non-compliance with her laws. To ladies, to invalids, and men of business, whose sedentary occupations preclude the possibility of healthful exercise, the Turkish bath presents an inestimable boon.