the act of using or applying a bath; that is, of immersing the body, or part of it, in water or other fluid.

Bathing is a practice of great antiquity. It prevailed among the Greeks as early as the heroic age; and we even find mention made by Homer of hot baths in the Trojan times, although these seem to have been rare; indeed Athenaeus speaks of hot baths as unusual even in his age. Public baths were in fact discouraged, and even prohibited, by the ancient Greeks, who were content to perform their ablutions in private, and without either luxury or parade. The method of lavation among this people consisted in heating water in a large three-footed vessel, and thence pouring it on the head and shoulders of the bather while seated in a tub, and he, on coming out, was anointed with oil.

It was also long before the Romans came into the use of baths; the very name of which, thermae, shows that the practice had been borrowed from the Greeks. As the ancient Romans were chiefly employed in agriculture, their custom was, every evening after work, to wash their arms and legs, that they might sit down to supper with more decency; for it is to be observed that the use of linen was then unknown, and the people of that age went with their arms and legs bare, and consequently exposed to dust and filth. But this was not all. Every ninth day, when they repaired to the city, either to the nundinae or to attend at the assemblies of the people, they bathed in the Tiber, or some other river which happened to be nearest them.

This seems to have been all the bathing known till the time of Pompey, when the custom of bathing every day appears to have been introduced.

The Celtic nations were not unacquainted with bathing, although it must be confessed that some of their descendants have evinced but little taste for scrupulous ablution. The ancient Germans bathed every day in warm water during winter, and in cold water during summer. In England, the famous bath in Somerseshire is said by some to have been in use eight centuries before Christ. Of this, however, it must be owned, we have but slender evidence; although Dr Musgrave makes it probable that it was a place of considerable resort in Geta's time, the remains of a statue erected to that general, in gratitude for some benefactions he had conferred upon it, being still in existence.

Although bathing, among the ancients, made, as it were, a part of diet, and was used as familiarly as eating or sleep; yet, as we learn from Strabo, Pliny, Hippocrates, and Oribasius, it was in high esteem among their physicians as a cure for certain diseases; and hence their frequent exhortations to washing in the sea and plunging into cold water. The first instance of cold bathing for medicinal purposes is that of Melampus, who bathed the daughters of the king of Argos; and the first instance of warm bathing is that of Medea, who was said to boil people alive, probably with some reason, since Pelias' king of Thessaly died in a hot bath under her hands. The cold bath was used with success by Antonius Musa, physician to the emperor Augustus, for the recovery of that prince; but it fell into neglect after the death of Marcellus, who was believed to have met his death from indulging in it to excess. Towards the close of the reign of Nero, however, it was again brought into vogue by a physician of Marseille named Charmis; but the fashion proved short-lived, and, during the succeeding ages, when the physical condition of the people became as much deteriorated as their intellectual and moral character, this cleanly practice was altogether abandoned.

A methodical arrangement of the medical and physiological effects of the practice of bathing, referred to the respective divisions of therapeutic agencies, would be of great use in enabling us to attain a distinct idea of their nature; but such an arrangement is, in fact, a matter of extreme difficulty, for two reasons: first, because the temperature, the continuance, and the impregnation of the bath, are capable of being so varied, as materially to vary the nature of the remedy without any distinct limit between its different forms; and, secondly, because the classes of medical agents to which several of these effects belong are by no means distinctly defined, to say nothing of the additional complexity arising from the division of the effects into immediate and remote, which is often extremely important. The remote effects, however, being of a more general nature, and relating chiefly to the improvement or deterioration of the actions of the whole system, it is only the immediate effects that require to be accurately analyzed and distinguished, and these we must endeavour to reduce to some methodical classification of therapeutic powers.