The Turkish Bath, Its Design and Construction

The Turkish Bath, Its Design and Construction is a book by Robert Owen Allsop, an architect, with chapters on the adaptation of the bath to the private house, the institution, and the training stable. The preface says the object of the author is to provide, in addition to a text-book for the architect, a treatise which shall enable the public to form their own judgment as to the relative merits of the baths that compete for their patronage.

The author borrows terms from the old Roman vocabulary for the apartments of the modern bath, calling the washing room the Lavatorium, the cooling room the Frigidarium, and the separate dressing room the Apodyterium. The text says that two changes are wrought in the air as it passes onward through the various rooms: it loses so much of the caloric with which it is charged for every foot it travels, and it becomes laden with the exhalations from the lungs of the bathers. The text also says that for practical purposes all we need here consider is the design of the bath for horses.