Baths of My Own Lovely Lee – Frank McNally on a Corkman who revolutionised personal hygiene

In Baden-Baden and other traditional spa resorts of Europe, you can still avail yourself of an experience called a “Romano-Irish bath”.

Here, we would probably call it a Turkish bath. The fact that elsewhere, Ireland is co-credited for the invention – and given equal billing with the great plumbers of ancient Europe – is largely the work of a 19th-century Corkman.

Never mind the Banks, the baths that Dr Richard Barter established in the Leeside village of Inniscarra in 1856 set a fashion that soon spread to Britain and beyond.

Born in Cooldaniel in 1802, he had already done pioneering work on the treatment of cholera during the 1832 epidemic.

The Dublin-New York Portal didn’t show us Manhattan, just our badly-behaved selves

---

Cannes 2024 Movie Quiz Special: How many women have won the Palme d’Or for directing?

---

Eric Clapton in Dublin review: guitar hero rocks the grey-haired faithful with a night of classics

---

Dublin-Monaghan bombings: ‘When I looked out into the street, I knew all normality was gone. It was like hell on Earth’

---

Now he borrowed the concept of the Turkish hammam, via a Scottish enthusiast David Urquhart, who had discovered it while serving as a British diplomat in the Middle East.

In his book The Pillars of Hercules (1850), Urquhart rhapsodised the experience:

“The body has come forth shining like alabaster, fragrant as the cistus [a Mediterranean flower], sleek as satin and soft as velvet. The touch of your own skin is electric…There is an intoxication or dream that lifts you out of the flesh, and yet a sense of life or consciousness that spread through every member.”

That quotation features in the latest issue of the London Review of Books, in a piece arguing that Urquhart started a revolt against “the asceticism of the Christian tradition, which had begun with St Jerome and his praise of alousia, the state of being unwashed: “He who has once bathed in Christ has no need of another bath.’”

In any case, the Scotsman found an eager disciple from Cork. And as the LRB summarises: “The practical result was that the baths, variously described as Turkish, Roman, and Irish, sprang up across Britain from the 1850s, promoted by Uruqhart and his Irish collaborator Dr Richard Barter, who got the measure of cholera twenty years before the more famous physician John Snow.”

We’ll come back to Snow shortly. But one result of the subsequent bathing craze was the Turkish Bath Company of Dublin, at Lincoln Place, which in newspaper advertisements offered “Turkish or Irish Baths” for individuals or groups of up to seven, in private rooms, with a restaurant and “horse bath” also among the facilities.

That premises earned a slightly steamy mention in Ulysses (written by the son of a Corkman), when Leopold Bloom, while buying soap in Sweny’s, turns his attention to water (and other things):

“Time to get a bath around the corner. Hammam. Turkish. Massage. Dirt gets rolled up in your navel. Nicer if a girl did it. Also I think I. Yes I. Do it in the bath. Curious longing I. Water to water. Combine business and pleasure.”

Then Bloom remembers he’s on the way to a funeral, which has the effect on his thoughts of a cold shower.

By coincidence, recently, I attended the staged reading of a play-in-progress called Miasma, by Colin Murphy. It tells the story of the afore-mentioned English doctor, John Snow, and his battle to persuade authorities in Britain that cholera was a water-borne disease.

The play’s title is drawn from a competing obsession of the era: that the infection arose from the “bad air” to which 19th century cities and London especially were prone.

Snow triumphed in the end by tracing an 1854 epidemic in Soho to a single water pump used by the public. He proved his point, and in the process saved a lot of lives, by removing the handle.

As in his staging of the Treaty Debates, televised earlier this year, Murphy drew on the public record for his work, boiling vast amounts of verbiage down to an hour of tightly-tuned drama.

But in this case the 19th-century debates about cholera were also given an added layer of irony thanks to their many echoes in much more recent pandemic, underlined in a Q & A session after the show involving Dr Luke O’Neill and others.

Vital as his work make have been for London and England, Snow was not the first person on these islands to realise the importance of clean water in preventing cholera outbreaks. As the LRB notes, Barter was on to that general principle before him, to less dramatic effect.

And even after Snow’s breakthrough, the word was slow to gain acceptance, so that others had to reach the same conclusions independently.

These included Dublin Corporation’s water analyst Charles Cameron, who in 1866 suspected the presence of sewage in a pump at Duke Lane, near Grafton Street. It too was closed eventually, but not before causing more than a thousand deaths.