Bains liquides ou bains de vapeurs : concurrence entre deux états de l’eau (France – premier xixe siècle)
Medical brochures promoting steam baths proliferated in the first half of the 19th century. Although these publications were devoted to fumigations, they included several references to spa towns. Despite the therapeutic proximity of the two water-based treatments, liquid baths and vapor baths were s...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Presses universitaires du Midi
2023-12-01
|
| Series: | Histoire, Médecine et Santé |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://journals.openedition.org/hms/7384 |
| Summary: | Medical brochures promoting steam baths proliferated in the first half of the 19th century. Although these publications were devoted to fumigations, they included several references to spa towns. Despite the therapeutic proximity of the two water-based treatments, liquid baths and vapor baths were systematically pitted against each other, although no medical theories could justify the superiority attributed to fumigations. The latter were elevated to the status of miraculous cures through stories of healing, whose repetitive pattern underlined the artificiality of a rhetoric designed to discredit spas. At the time, spas were the main competing remedy to steam baths in a booming therapeutic market. This opposition was primarily commercial rather than medical, as demonstrated by the transformation of Lyon-based physician Toussaint Rapou’s fumigatory establishment into a balneo-fumigatory institution in 1828. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 2263-8911 2557-2113 |