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Baths are used as a relaxant after exercise and as a form of treatment for injuries. There are many forms. Contrast baths are commonly used to treat sports injuries, such as a sprained ankle. They involve subjecting a person first to water as hot as he or she can tolerate, then to water as cold as can be tolerated. Alternate use of hot and cold water stimulates the blood supply to the immersed body part and helps to reduce swelling. See also flotation therapy.
In Greece, bathing was not the social institution it became in Roman times. Public baths existed, but frequent use of warm water was sometimes regarded as excessively luxurious, especially by the Spartans, except to relax the muscles after exercise. A kind of soap was used as well as the strigil (a curved instrument made of metal or bone) to remove oil and dirt from the skin. After bathing both men and women anointed themselves with oil.
The Roman baths are one of the most characteristic of their institutions, found universally in the Roman world and enjoyed by all classes of society. During their earlier history the Romans bathed only for the sake of cleanliness. The earliest known public baths are found at Pompeii and date from the early first century BC. The process of bathing changed radically with the invention of the system for carrying hot air from a furnace through passages under floors (hypocausts), and through ducts embedded in room walls. With this providing warm water and hot air, by the middle of the first century BC the use of public and private baths had become general, and though public baths were intended at first for the poor they were soon made use of by all classes. Baths were communal, each being roughly the size of a small, shallow swimming-pool. The price of a bath was a quadrans, the smallest piece of coined money, virtually worthless. The essential rooms for public baths were the changing-room (apodyterium), the cold-bath room (frigidarium), and a warm-bath room (caldarium). Larger establishments might include a warm room (tepidarium), a hot vapour bath (laconicum), a sweating-room (sudatorium), suites of recreational rooms, exercise grounds (it was usual to take exercise before bathing), and gardens. These buildings were the natural medium for the development of concrete vaulted architecture, and the surviving baths strongly influenced the style of Renaissance architecture. Though mixed bathing was not unknown, women more usually had separate (and inferior) baths adjoining those of the men.
Form of treatment used as a relaxant after activity and as a therapy for some sports injuries. There are many types of baths, but they all act by either extracting heat from or adding heat to the body. See also contrast baths.
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baths
baths, in architecture. Ritual bathing is traceable to ancient Egypt, to prehistoric cities of the Indus River valley, and to the early Aegean civilizations. Remains of bathing apartments dating from the Minoan period exist in the palaces at Knossos and Tiryns. The ancient Greeks devised luxurious bathing provisions, with heated water, plunges, and showers. Bathing in public facilities, or thermae, was developed by the Romans to a unique degree. Thermae, probably copied after the Greek gymnasia, had impressive interiors, with rich mosaics, rare marbles, and gilded metals. Water, brought by aqueducts, was stored in reservoirs, heated to various temperatures, and distributed by piping to the bath apartments. Certain rooms were kept heated by means of furnaces which sent hot air into lines of flues beneath floors and in the walls. There are ruins of public baths in Pompeii, and in Rome there exist extensive remains of the thermae of Titus (A.D. 80), of Caracalla (A.D. 212-35), and of Diocletian (A.D. 302).
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Food and Fitness: A Dictionary of Diet and Exercise. Copyright © 1997, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
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