The final two chapters, “Spa Doctors” and “Hospital for the Nation,” honor the portrait’s subjects, Oliver and Peirce. The book then returns to the Hoare portrait, with subsequent chapters on “Aches, Paints, and Rheumatism” (represented by the female patient), “The Palsy” and “The Gout” (after the male patient), and “Scabbes, Scurf and Lepers,” as well as “Children at the Spa” (for the youthful patient). Rolls’s expertise as a medical doctor anchors these chapters, as he provides helpful information about modern understandings of the relative efficacy of these regimes. But when nineteenth-century analyses revealed the waters to contain few, if any, of these substances, spa doctors shifted their treatments to include the use of static electricity, radio waves, and even radon. For much of Bath’s history, medical practitioners believed its waters were impregnated with beneficial salts and minerals. The book commences with two chapters on the chemical properties of the waters, and describes their uses from the first century CE through to the present. Peirce Examining Patients (1762), which depicts two men conducting physical examinations of three patients: a small child suffering from a skin disease, a man with palsy, and a woman who has rheumatism. ![]() The book is structured around a portrait by William Hoare, Dr. Rolls, a medical doctor as well as an author and amateur historian, provides a detailed examination of the medical uses of the thermal waters that have made Bath, a small city located in the west of England, a famous health resort. ![]() Scholars interested in the medical history of Bath Spa will learn much from Roger Rolls’s book Diseased, Douched and Doctored: Thermal Springs, Spa Doctors and Rheumatic Diseases.
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