Turkish baths for animals

Newcastle Turkish Baths for Horses

In a personal letter, quoted in an article in The Field, G[eorge] Crawshay told [Stewart Erskine] R[olland] that Stephenson was the best vet in Newcastle, and that he had opened these baths after reading an earlier article which had appeared in The Field. This would have been the much quoted letter from Admiral Rous on the training of horses. Crawshay wrote:

I went...and found the fire on and the bath heating, the whole contrived most cheaply and simply. A horse had been in on Friday, and had had a sweat with excellent results.

Stephenson's Turkish bath, built just months after the first one opened for public use at Lincoln Place, Dublin, was probably only the second to be built, though Stephenson may not have known about Barter's bath.

Crawshay's view of Stephenson's ability as a vet was astute, for he later became one of the first local authority veterinary inspectors, and world famous, not only as a vet, but as an innovative breeder of Aberdeen Angus cattle at the farm at Longbenton which he leased from Balliol College, Oxford.

At his death in 1918, he left £10,000 to Durham University to establish a chair in comparative pathology and bacteriology, and to pay half the costs of setting up a research department in Newcastle. This later became Newcastle University School of Agriculture whose main lecture theatre is named after him.