The Turkish bath in health and disease : being the substance of a lecture delivered at Sheffield on the 10th of December, 1858 / by John le Gay Brereton.

  • Brereton, J. le Gay (John le Gay), 1827-1886.
Date:
[1860]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Turkish bath in health and disease : being the substance of a lecture delivered at Sheffield on the 10th of December, 1858 / by John le Gay Brereton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    s functions of the skin—diseases of civilization ali, and most of them to a considerable extent peculiar to the non-working classes. We eat animal food in this country to excess, loading the blood with fibrine and albumen. At the same time, we do not take measures to get rid of this excess. What is to become of it? Why, it either remains in the blood, and becomes the fermentuig soil for typhus and other putrid diseases, or it is depo'sited in the tissues in the form of tubercle, gout stones, &c. Violent inflammations too are fed by this same fibrine. To get rid of a portion of it, the surgeon bleeds his patient. But alas I while he lets out the fibrine, he lets out also the blood-globules, which carry the oxygen from the lungs and skin to the tissues. This oxygen is the very thing that is wanted. The carriers of the patient's very life are cut off. He will soon make up the fibrine, the enemy; the beef steaks and porter pre- scribed will soon do that work; but the blood globules, his deliverers, he does not make up, let him eat and drink what he will. He is more liable than before to be re-attacked by the disease, and less able to combat it. I have already draAra your attention to the skin as a respiratory organ, that is as a breather. You all know that we breathe with the lungs ; that carbon and other matter is consumed, and the blood renewed with oxj'^gen as it passes through that organ. That is what constitutes breafhiiifj and maintains animal heat. Well, the skin is also a respiratory organ. Some animals have no lungs, and breathe entirely with the skin ; others with a portion of the skin modified into gills or rudimentary lungs. In higher animals, though the lungs become especially devoted to this function, the skin still retains it to such an extent, that to interfere with it there, is dangerous; to arrest it, fatal. The skin, like the lungs, exhales carbonic-acid, and inhales oxygen, as may easily be proved by holding the hand in a vessel of oxygen, when that gas will by-and-bye be replaced by carbonic-acid. You all know from daily experience the intimate sym- pathy between the skin and the lungs. When you are walking fast, how much more easily you get along after you have broken out into a slight perspiration. If you are riding, your horse freshens up under the same condition. In a vapour bath, although your head is in the air, you soon begin to feel suffocated, because the skin cannot breathe. If you remain too long in a wet-pack, or in a hot-water bath, the same sensation will l)e felt. In the lamp bath too, when your head is still out, you soon feel faint, and as if short of breath. Wliy ? Because the lamp is consuming the oxygen in the bath, and the skin can no longer breatlie. Now, you all know that if any of you were to hold your head long enough in a vessel or pool of water, thereby excluding oxygen from the lungs, that you would be drowned. Are yon aware that if you as effectually exclude air from the skin you will die, not quite so soon, but quite as certainly ? \A'hen Leo X. was raised to the Pontificate, a child was gilded over, at Florence, to represent the golden age. Tlie child died in a few hours. Extensive