Works of the late Doctor Benjamin Franklin/New Mode of Bathing
NEW MODE OF BATHING.
EXTRACTS OF LETTERS TO M. DUBOURG.
I GREATLY approve the epithet which you give, in your letter of the 8th of June, to the new method of treating the fmall pox, which you call the tonic or bracing method: I will take occaſion, from it, to mention a practice to which I have accuſtomed myſelf. You know the cold bath has long been in vogue here as a tonic but the ſhock of the cold water has always appeared to me, generally ſpeaking, as too violent, and I have found it much more agreeable to my conſtitution to bathe in another element, I mean cold air. With this view I riſe early almoſt every morning, and ſit in my chamber without any clothes whatever, half an hour or an hour, according to the ſeaſon, either reading or writing. This practice is not in the leaſt painful, but, on the contrary, agreeable; and if I return to bed afterwards, before I dreſs myſelf, as ſometimes happens, I make a ſupplement to my night's reſt of one or two hours of the moſt pleaſing ſleep that can be imagined. I find no ill conſequences whatever reſulting from it, and that at leaſt it does not injure my health, if it does not in fact contribute much to its preſervation.—I ſhall therefore call it for the future a bracing or tonic bath.
I ſhall not attempt to explain why damp clothes occaſion colds, rather than wet ones, becauſe I doubt the fact; I imagine that neither the one nor the other contribute to this effect, and that the cauſes of colds are totally independent of wet and even of cold. I propoſe writing a ſhort paper on this ſubject, the firſt moment of leiſure I have at my diſpoſal.—In the mean time I can only ſay, that having ſome ſuſpicions that the common notion, which attributes to cold the property of ſtopping the pores and obſtructing perſpiration, was ill founded, I engaged a young phyſician, who is making ſome experiments with Sanctorius's balance, to eſtimate the different proportions of his perſpiration, when remaining one hour quite naked, and another warmly clothed. He purſued the experiment in this alternate manner for eight hours ſucceſſively, and found his perſpiration almoſt double during thoſe hours in which he was naked.