The House I Live In: A Guide to the Preservation of Health and the Attainment of Longevity; Being a Condensed Treatise on the Importance of Physical Education and on the Subject of Bathing, by J.W. Ford, Kindle Edition

Description

What could a physician from the year 1830 have to say that could possibly be of use to us today? How about, “Take a bath”? In The House I Live In, Author J.W. Ford, M.D., explains why sometimes some people should take a cold bath, and some should take a tepid bath, but pretty much everyone should have a vapour bath, also known as a steam bath, as often as possible. It’s no coincidence that the doctor had a thriving business administering “Simple and Medicated Vapor Baths” at his residence on Tyler Street in Lowell, Massachusetts.

In this book, Dr. Ford takes an interesting look at the skin as an organ of exhalation and the damage to internal organs that he says can result when the skin can’t breathe properly. He writes, “Every one knows that the skin perspires, and that checked perspiration is a powerful cause of disease and of death.” Well, everyone doesn’t know that these days, but thanks for reminding us.

He writes that a “great variety of diseases incident to the human frame … may be entirely prevented by” bathing. At that time, in 1830, “bathing has been almost totally neglected,” he says, but he saw an upward trend in this “practice of the ancients” and found it therefore “not beyond the reach of probability, that bathing may eventually come into general use in this country.”

I’d love to come home from my doctor with a prescription to visit a steam room or turn my bathroom into one. I believe that Dr. J.W. Ford, writing almost 200 years ago, had the right idea about one of the foundations of health: letting your skin breathe. And this book is a good, sane reminder across the centuries.