APPLICATION OF THE BATH TO HORSES AND CATTLE, FOR TRAINING, AND THE CURE OF DISEASE.

The Turkish Bath is not only applicable to man, but is suitable also to animals, to the horse and the dog, those faithful and useful friends and companions of man; and also to his oxen, his cows, and his sheep. In the instance of the horse and dog, it is capable of preserving health and condition, and preparing them by training for those feats of strength and speed which are peculiar to those animals. And it becomes an important and valuable medicine in treating their diseases.

In employing the bath as a means of training, we must have clearly before us the powers of the bath, on the one hand, and the precise objects which we wish to attain, on the other. The bath will abstract the old material from the system, and will thereby render the system more ready to take up and more capable of appropriating new and strengthening nutritious matter which may be given to supply its place. In other words, it will do the sweating part of the process excellently, without fatigue, without wear and tear to the economy. But this, although a necessary part of the process of training, is only a part of the process. Other means are required to direct the new nutritive matter to the organs which especially require it—the organs of locomotion; and the principal of these means is exercise. The racehorse must still have his muscles trained by exercise; the prize-fighter, prize-runner, or prize-rower, must still pursue a systematic course of exercise; but the exercise in both instances is only that which is required to educate the muscles, to give them power, precision, facility of action, and to strengthen the breathing function; the exercise for the abstraction of unnecessary matter, for the removal of fat, is no longer requisite; for that the bath will amply and sufficiently provide.

My friend Mr. Goodwin, of Hampton Court, who has had much and the best kind of experience in the management of horses, tells me that for more than twenty-five years he has been in the habit of having his horses washed whenever they returned to the stable in a state of perspiration, and with the result that his stable was remarkable for the health and condition of the animals. His process was as follows:—the horses were thoroughly sponged over with warm water; then with tepid water; and, lastly, with cold; the water was then scraped out of their coats with a scraper (strigillum), and they were well wiped down with a leather. After this they were covered with a cotton sheet, and their legs were bandaged with cotton rollers. In fifteen or twenty minutes the sheet was raised gradually, first at one corner, then at another, until it was completely removed; the uncovered portion being thoroughly wiped before the next was proceeded with, and the process being continued until the animal was completely dry. After this treatment, there was no fear of any subsequent breaking out, and however sharply the horses had been worked, frequently after a run at the rate of twenty miles an hour, they were ready and willing for a double feed of oats.

How different this picture from that of the common condition of horses under similar circumstances; breaking out into a profuse, and often a succession of profuse perspirations after being put into the stable, and unable to eat their corn from faintness and exhaustion. But how curious the parallel with the stages of the Turkish Bath: the exercise is the sudatorium; then the operations of the lavatorium; firstly, the warm affusion, then the cold douche and the strigil; and, lastly, the frigidarium and the sheet. Nay, the parallel permits of being pushed even one stage further. My friend W. says:—"I have no objection to see a friend in the bath, or invite him to dinner; but not both on the same day, for the bath makes him so hungry, that my cook threatens to give me warning."

Mr. Urquhart, in a note to "The Pillars of Hercules" observes:—"A plan has recently been successfully adopted for drying horses after hunting. Two men, one on each side, throw over him buckets of water as hot as he can bear it; he is then scraped, and rubbed with chamois leather, the head and ears carefully dried with a rubber, and his clothing put on. In twenty minutes he is perfectly dry, and there is no fear of his breaking out again: the old plan of rubbing him dry took from one to two hours of very hard work, and he generally broke out once or twice, and would often be found in a profuse sweat at twelve or one o'clock at night. The bath might be adopted for horses." "At present we shampoo our horses and clear off the epidermis, while we bestow no such care on our own bodies."

On the application of the Turkish Bath to the management and training of horses, the following letter, addressed by Mr. Goodwin to the Editor of Bell's Life, is especially important and interesting:—

I have assumed for the skin the rank of a respiratory, of a breathing organ; and have endeavoured to show that the cooling and drying operations of the Frigidarium are an important part of the bath, as their performance is associated with the exposure of the skin to the atmosphere. Mr. Witt urges the prolongation of this period of the bath to as lengthened a degree as possible; and he delights to tell his auditors, dispersed around him like Roman senators in the Forum, and with no other garment than a cotton scarf, variously and negligently twined around their bodies—that this was the period when Pliny betook himself to his garden, and in the full light of the sun, and refreshed by the sweet breath of the unfettered winds of Heaven, walked in pleasant contemplation on a terrace carpeted with a beautiful little moss of velvet softness. We read that Sir Walter Scott indulged in this kind of atmospheric bath; we recognise in it the special charm and much of the value of the river bath and the sea-shore bath; and we are not startled when we hear from the mouth of an advocate of the Turkish Bath, Dr. John Le Gay Brereton, in a lecture delivered in Sheffield in 1858, that—"After leaving the hot room in Bradford bath, bathers were in the habit, last winter, of jumping into a bed of snow which had been collected for the purpose. I have myself spent the whole night in the woods at Blarney, without any clothing save the bath-sheet, after coming out of Dr. Barter's bath at that place. This was after a ball, when, with several other gentlemen, we had retreated to the bath for the sake of refreshment from fatigue. So delightful was the cool air, that when far away from any dwelling, we threw aside even our sheets, to enjoy the morning breeze at daybreak. You need not then fear exposure to the air, after the bath; it is not so much for the sake of cooling that this process is necessary, as to keep up the action of the bath by exposing the skin to air; it is to compel the skin to breathe."

The importance of ventilating the skin is illustrated in the process of clipping and singeing, as applied to the horse. The thickening and lengthening of the coat of the horse in the autumn season is a change obviously adapted to prepare the animal for the coming severity of the winter; and however natural in his wild state, is ill suited to his condition as a useful and obedient servant of man. As autumn advances, and after a few cold days, the coat of the horse appears as if "broken up" into plots, and the individual hairs stand out roughly, or, in technical language, the coat "stares." Accompanying this change in the appearance of the skin, the animal becomes weak and languid, loses his spirit, breaks out into sudden and abundant perspirations upon slight exercise, and shows himself unequal to his work. Now, the ready remedy for this state of things is the removal of the excess of hair, and the exposure of the skin to the action of the atmosphere. If the coat be clipped close to the skin or singed, or, better still, be shaven, the animal preserves his strength and vigour, and is equal to all the labour that may reasonably be imposed upon him. Of the three processes, shaving is the best, then clipping, and lastly singeing. As to the latter, it is not quite clear whether its inferior position in rank to the others is due to the less complete exposure of the skin to the action of the air, or to the sealing of the ends of the hairs by the act of burning. It is not improbable that the cut ends of the hair in shaving and clipping may serve as breathing pores for the inhalation of air, an advantage to the oxygenization of the circulation in the skin that is lost in the contraction and obliteration of the cells of the hair which ensues after singeing.

Another curious concomitant of clipping is the change in the colour of the coat, a change which seems to indicate that the colour of the hair produced in the winter time is different from that of the summer.

Dr. Barter, who has done so much to advance the popularity of the bath in Ireland, and has given much attention to farming operations, has applied the bath to the treatment of animals suffering under disease. The following extracts from a "Report of the Committee appointed to inquire into the Utility of the Turkish Bath erected by Dr. Barter, at St. Ann's, Blarney, for the Cure of Distemper in Cattle," have an interest peculiarly their own. Referring to one of the patients, the reporters observe: "We were informed she had been about an hour and a half in, had been eight days under treatment, and, as we were able subsequently to satisfy ourselves, had scarcely a trace of disease about her, and the next day was to be returned to the herd cured. She seemed quite to enjoy her position, the perspiration was rolling off her freely, and her breathing was slightly quickened. She carried her head erect, her eyes clear and healthy, and when she was removed to the outer room to get her douche-bath, no one could mistake the feeling of refreshment and pleasure that the dashing of each successive bucket of water over her seemed to give, and when she had been slightly rubbed down she was turned out to graze, the day being fine and warm; but when otherwise, there is a shed close by into which the animals are turned after leaving the bath, to let them further cool and dry before being allowed out.

"One circumstance is worthy of remark, which applies to all the animals treated in the bath, and testified to by the men in charge of the four different baths we were shown—namely, the evident pleasurable recollection the bath seems to leave with them; all the different animals—horses, dogs, cattle, and pigs—going of their own accord to the door of the bath, and dogs particularly indicating their anxiety by waiting at the door, whining till it is opened, and then running in.

"This finished our inspection, and we now beg to submit to your council the conclusions at which we have arrived from the above facts, and the information we were able to obtain in the course of our inquiries.

"First, the proportion of deaths to recoveries in the treatment of cattle distemper with the Turkish Bath does not appear to exceed one in ten, while the proportion that has been hitherto usual under other forms of treatment has varied from one death in three to one in four of the cattle attacked.

"Secondly, that the constitution is not impaired by the treatment with the bath as it is by any of the other systems with which we are at present acquainted; and that this fact is particularly illustrated by the rapidity with which, in every case, the milk almost immediately returns on the animal being relieved from the disease.

"Thirdly, that in the treatment of several of the well-known serious diseases of the inferior animals, its use has been attended with the most favourable results, and particularly in all inflammatory diseases of the internal organs.

"In conclusion, while we are far from thinking that a subject of such vast importance could be satisfactorily investigated in the very limited time we were able to devote to it, we nevertheless feel that we have seen and heard quite enough to warrant us in recommending the subject to the calm and serious investigation of those most vitally interested in the subject."