2. HOW ANIMALS CAME TO HAVE TURKISH BATHS

Animal health in 19th century farming was crucial; a sick animal, in the absence of cures, was often simply slaughtered. With few professional veterinary surgeons, anyone could write V.S. after their name, and animals were regularly ‘treated’ by stable owners, farriers or farmers.

Barter, physician and farmer, after successfully using Turkish baths with his patients, saw no reason why they should not be effective with animals. Symptoms in humans such as loss of appetite and fever, and signs such as rapid respiratory rate, cough and nasal discharges with painful, difficult breathing, were not all that different from those of bovine pleuropneumonia.  

So he came to believe that if Turkish baths were helpful in treating certain diseased conditions of the human body they should also be helpful treating similar conditions in cattle and other animals.

He decided to build a Turkish bath for them.

In doing so, Ireland's pre-eminent hydropathist, Richard Barter, trained at the College of Physicians in London, a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, and a farmer founding member and honorary secretary of the County of Cork Agricultural Society, became, I suggest here, the first practitioner of the now fashionable concept of One Health.

His first experiments seemed to confirm his belief. Seven out of eight cows with pleuro-pneumonia were cured, while only one died—a much lower death rate than usual. Barter also believed in preventative medicine, and cows were given Turkish baths for several days before calving. It’s worth noting, perhaps, that in the Finnish countryside, women often chose to give birth in the family sauna until well into the 20th century.

John Enraght Scriven, a local farmer staying at St Ann’s, claimed to have been the first to use the cattle bath for a sick horse, attending it himself for five days because his grooms were too ‘ignorantly prejudiced’ to enter the bath themselves.

The horse after an hour or so followed me around the apartment, and would not rest unless he had his muzzle on my shoulder or was licking my hand.

And when Dr Robert Wollaston visited St Ann’s in 1859, he reported that the cattle bath was also being used for any sick horses or dogs on the farm.

It is curious to observe with what patience and apparent satisfaction they endure the process of sudorification. Various diseases incidental to domestic animals, besides the distemper and epidemics, have been cured by the hot-air Bath; and I witnessed the curious spectacle of seeing two horses submitted to the process, with the perspiration rolling off their bodies, afterwards washed with tepid water, and then groomed or rubbed down with brushes steeped in cold water.

Later, when Scriven installed a bath on his own farm, he wrote that he now treated horses, sheep, pigs, dogs, cats, hens and chickens in it. The fire was permanently lit, the floor above was tiled so that the bath acted also as a kiln for drying grain, and the furnace gave a constant supply of hot water. The total cost for fuel, working, and repairs was £30 per year, including the attendant’s wages.

By the end of 1859, there were similar baths in neighbouring farms, and in nearby Cork, at least two vets were soon providing baths for animals.

But there were doubters, and the Council of the Royal Agricultural Society of Ireland set up a sub-committee, also in 1860, to report on ‘the efficacy of the Turkish bath as a remedy for distemper in horned animals’. Its members visited Turkish baths for cattle at four farms, including St Ann’s, and concluded:

i. that the proportion of deaths to recoveries from distemper in cattle was much lower with use of the bath;

ii. animals’ constitution not adversely affected;

iii. with lesser animals, treatment was also very favourable.

At St Ann’s, for example, out of three pigs with malignant black distemper, a disease considered virtually incurable, two recovered after use of the bath.

Of course, with such a small survey, these results were not statistically significant, and some observations were queried. Yet the report received widespread publicity, and the spread of Turkish baths for animals was encouraged, not only in Irish farming circles, but also abroad, as far afield as Australia.

In England, it was the horseracing fraternity, rather than gentlemen farmers, which initially adopted the Turkish bath to protect their investment in stock.

In April 1860, The Field published a seminal article, ‘The Turkish bath as a means of training’, arguing that the traditional practice of sweating racehorses to remove unwanted fat by means of heavily clothed, four or five mile gallops, was unnecessary.

Its author, Admiral Henry John Rous, maintained that it exhausted the horse; sweating in a Turkish bath was far more effective, leaving the horse in peak condition. This article led to much correspondence in The Field and, importantly, it directly inspired Clement Stephenson and James Moore, to provide Turkish baths at English veterinary practices at about the same time.