Microbial biofilm community structure and composition on the lithic substrates of Herculaneum Suburban Baths

In this work, we want to investigate the impact of different substrates and different environmental condition on the biofilm communities growing on plaster, marble, and mortar substrates inside the Herculaneum Suburban Baths. To do so, we measured environmental conditions and sampled biofilm communities along the walls of the baths and used culture-dependent and -independent molecular techniques (DGGE) to identify the species at each sampling sites. We used the species pool to infer structure and richness of communities within each site in each substrate, and confocal light scanning microscopy to assess the three-dimensional structure of the sampled biofilms. To gather further insights, we built a meta-community network and used its local realizations to analyze co-occurrence patterns of species. We found that light is a limiting factor in the baths environment, that moving along sites equals moving along an irradiation gradient, and that such gradient shapes the community structure, de facto separating a dark community, rich in Bacteria, Fungi and cyanobacteria, from two dim communities, rich in Chlorophyta. Almost all sites are dominated by photoautotrophs, with Fungi and Bacteria relegated to the role of rare species., and structural properties of biofilms are not consistent within the same substrate. We conclude that the Herculaneum suburban baths are an environment-shaped community, where one dark community (plaster) and one dim community (mortar) provides species to a “midway” community (marble).

Showers: from a violent treatment to an agent of cleansing

In the early nineteenth century, physicians designed the first manufactured showers for the purpose of curing the insane. Sustained falls of cold water were prescribed to cool hot, inflamed brains, and to instil fear to tame impetuous wills. By the middle of the century showers had appeared in both asylums and prisons, but shower-related deaths led to their decline. Rather than being abandoned, however, the shower was transformed by the use of warm water to economically wash the skins of prison and asylum populations. In stark contrast to an involuntary, deliberately unpleasant treatment, by the end of the century the shower was a desirable product for the improvement of personal hygiene and population health.

Wieland's nude bathers: visual pleasure and the female gaze

In her essays on Wieland, written around 1980, Elizabeth Boa went against contemporary fashion both by praising a neglected writer and by vindicating the role of pleasure in the reception of literature. She noted how Wieland varies a literary topos – a man watching a woman bathing naked – by letting women watch men bathing naked. This topos most often occurs in the pastoral, a popular eighteenth-century genre. Various examples are examined to show that they suggest equality rather than male dominance in relations between the sexes: men watching women bathing in James Thomson and Gottfried Keller; an example involving cross-dressing in Kleist; and finally women watching men bathing naked in Swift, Voltaire and Wieland's Idris und Zenide.

The value of the BJN -100 years ago

Among some of the recorded valuable functions of the BJN 100 years ago was that, ‘through its medium nurses can communicate to one another practical details, the value of which they have proved by personal experience.’ Today, the emphasis is fi rmly on evidence-based practice and research. Here are some practical experiences and examples of health-care practice long since changed over time.

[The Hammam in manuscripts and ancient works of the Arabic medical literature]

The first hammams appeared under the dynasty of Omeyyades. Having described the premises, the authors clarify the functioning of a hammam, then the beneficial effects of the bath.

[Turpentined vapour baths with coniferous oil]

This article presents the history of turpentined vapour baths used to treat rheumatismes. In the same time appeared patent medicines made with coniferous oil, sold by chemist near those baths establishments.

[Scabies and syphilis--aspects of treatments of skin- and venereal diseases at Copenhagen Kommunehospital 1863 - 92]

Scabies and syphilis was very common but social unaccepted diseases in the later part of the 19th century. In 1892, 1,210 patients with syphilis and 106 children suffering from scabies were treated at the Kommunehospital in Copenhagen. Case records from patients admitted March 19th and September 19th, form the study basis of different aspects of scabies and syphilis treatment in the period. In the mid 19th century different soap treatments were the common cure for scabies. In the 1880s the cure became napthollinement, powdering with flour followed by rapping the patient in a sheet. Throughout the whole period experiments with medicine and thereby the patients was the norm. The treatment of syphilis consisted of different forms of mercury cures combined with bathes. Admission time was long and the patient was rarely cured. Progress in the treatments of both diseases was made in the daily work with patients. Access to knowledge, economy, the effort of the physician and the relationship between the different professions and groups in the hospital influenced and formed the process.

‘Til Death Do Us Part?’ The Nurse’s Role in the Care of the Dead

In the immediate hours after a person takes his or her last breath, the nurse has always been present. In the hospital or at home, under hospice care or without warning, the nurse is frequently the last to hold the hand of those transitioning from life to death. The nurse, in assuring the patient and family a peaceful transition, finds her role to include caring for the body with reverence to the religious and cultural concerns that the patient holds sacred.

Helping the poor emerge from "urban barbarism to civic civilization": public bathhouses in America, 1890-1915

In an era when the luxury of private bathrooms had not yet been made widely available to the masses, local charities and municipal governments worked feverishly to construct public bathhouses. Reformers, including city officials, engineers, physicians, and members of the clergy, increased the number of public bath facilities across America from a mere six in 1894 to 49 by 1904. The urban poor took tens of millions of showers at the turn of the century as a result. What the poor may not have realized, however, is that the reformers of the Progressive Era had in mind a form of social engineering. Bathing, they argued, not only assisted in the containment of disease; it also served to instill upper-middle class values of self-respect, morality, and citizenship into the life and practice of the poor.

The history of gay bathhouses. 1984

Public policy regarding bathhouses has been criticized as being based on political expediency rather than on medical or social science. To affect that shortcoming, we include here a brief history of gay bathhouses. The history of the baths is rarely told, but whenever it is told it necessarily reflects the times in which it was written. For that reason, we include a history written in 1984, at the time that much of what was known about AIDS, routes of transmission and the role of the bathhouses was very much in flux. This history not only gives a context for the current discussion, but also allows the reader to see the history from that distant point in time. This paper was first published in December 1984 as an article in Coming Up!, a lesbian and gay community newspaper published monthly in San Francisco (California). It was later edited and reprinted in a book titled Policing Public Sex (1996). The version of the paper presented here is from the original 1984 article (pp. 15-19); several images appeared with the article that are not reproduced here. As with all the reprinted papers in this volume, no editorial changes were made to the paper and only minor typographical errors were corrected.

The use of prolonged baths in psychiatric care: understanding through fiction

Two autobiographical novels containing descriptions of prolonged baths from the patient's perspective are referred to and analysed. They include depictions of patients who are treated roughly. Staff do not interact verbally with the patients, who attempt to discern the intentions and moods of the staff through their body language. The depictions from the patient's perspective are discussed in relation to nurses' narratives with the use of medico-historical references and psychological literature.

Narratives on prolonged baths from psychiatric care in Sweden during the first half of the twentieth century

Prolonged baths were used within psychiatric care in Sweden during the first half of the twentieth century. Eight reports from nursing staff about experiences of prolonged baths were analysed. The aim is to gain a better understanding of what it could have meant for caregivers to give prolonged baths. The nursing staff described their work with the baths as an extremely tiresome and trying duty that was delegated to inexperienced personnel. They regarded the patients as impossible to communicate with verbally. Prolonged baths were said to have been used on 'the most severely disturbed', violent, or untidy patients. The nurses describe the patients' discomfort and protests, but also point out that the baths had the intended effect of calming down disturbed patients. Prolonged baths also functioned as a restraint.

[Thermalism in ancient world]

The importance of water was well known in Prehistory and in ancient World. There are, in Homeric poems, several descriptions of cold and warm baths, a witness of their utilization in ancient Greek civilization. But the sources of water were always linked with the divinities of the Earth, and the temples dedicated to Asklepios had also thermal baths. The Romans, heirs of Etruscan culture, made the baths a social and public matter, and in Rome the Thermate reached a high degree of perfection.

[Spas in Gallo-roman Aquitaine]

We have various witnesses about spas during the gallo-roman period; it is in Luchon, Dax, Bagnères-de-Bigorre and Amélie les Bains, that we have the most important number of documents, coins, various chinas, and votive stones. It is interesting to note that after two thousand years the therapeutic qualities of mineral hot waters springs are still recognized; and in addition to the four mentioned spas, we can add: Barbotan, Prechacq, Saint-Christau, Capvern, Encausse, Salies-du-Salat, Ax-les-Thermes, Aulus, Alet, Rennes-les-Bains. It is interesting also to note that goddesses exhibited near the springs, were later replaced by Saints, which were the only explanation about the activity of the springs during several centuries.

Birth of St. Mary (St. Anne's parturition) in the light of messages from medical education: three examples from Croatian sacral heritage

Christian tradition treats birth in several characteristic motives. The most frequent is the Birth of Jesus Christ, while much rarer is the apocryphal motive of the birth of St. Mary. By analyzing three paintings from Croatian 16-17th-century sacral-art heritage, depicting the parturition of St. Anne (St. Mary's Mother), the authors of this paper are trying to define the role of ethnomedical notions in the formation of modern medical and general culture.

Profit is a dirty word: the development of the public baths and wash-houses in Britain 1847-1915

Researh on sanitary reform in nineteenth-century Britain has focused mainly on the introduction of large-sanitary infrastructure, especially waterworks and sewage systems. Other sanitary measures such as the provision of public baths and wash-houses have been ignored, or discussed in the limited context of working-class responses to middle-class sanitarianism. Yet by 1915 public baths and wash-houses were to be found in nearly every British town and city. A detailed analysis of these 'enterprises' can provide a useful way of understanding the changing priorities of public health professionals and urban authorities as well as the changing attitudes of the working classes. Connections between personal cleanliness and disease evolved during the century, particularly after the formation of germ theory in the 1880s. This paper demonstrates how the introduction of public baths and wash-houses in Liverpool, Belfast, and Glasgow was initially a direct response to sanitary reform campaigns. It also shows that the explicit public health ideology of these developments was constantly compromised by implicit concerns about municipal finance and the potential profit that such enterprises could generate. This city-based analysis shows that this conflict hindered the full sanitary benefit which these schemes potentially offered.