Medical Hydrology and Balneology: Environmental Aspects

The psychiatry showers in the nineteenth century:
a peculiar episode
San José JC (1)
(1) Sociedad Española de Hidrología Médica, President, Madrid, Spain
juancarlossanjose@yahoo.es
Introduction and Objectives
During the the nineteenth century, several events converged in Psychiatry, in
Hydrotherapy and in Thermal Medicine. Began the end for prepharmacological age
to psychiatric illnesses. The psychiatric institutions left to be the asylum by vagrants,
prostitutes and disabled. Pinel undertook the liberation of psychiatric patients
with the remaining chains to keep them locked. Appear the systems to give
water under pressure and to use the showers. There is not institution psychiatric that
not use the showers for the treatment of their sick.
If we consider, in Thermal Medicine that a shower is a projection of water on the
individual, this stage of the nineteenth century is a peculiar event because it was
used several kind of showers which have not been used again, most of the time to
break the sick and other to cause them a real shock therapy
Keywords: Thermal Shower, Hydrotherapy, History, Psychiatric
Balnea
2012, núm. 6, 283
283
ISBN: 978-84-669-1887-0
978-84-669-3482-4