#electric bath

Electric Bath • Gone Tomorrow

The Shocking Truth About Electric Baths and RA

Toasters and bathtubs, we have all been warned as children, do not mix. But late 19e century, if you had been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, chances are you would have been taken to a special hospital room and placed in an electrified bathtub powered by large batteries. Then the doctors would have turned on the power. These tubs were called galvanic baths. A little over a century ago, they…

“People who bathe themselves thoroughly in soap and water every day have an idea that they are utterly free from microbes and that their skin cannot be made any cleaner. If these people had only the opportunity to gaze for a moment through a very powerful microscope such as mine, they would be utterly astonished to see the millions of germs swarming over every inch of their own bodies. These germs, besides making such a hideous sight, are eating up the vitality and freshness and destroying the healthy particles of the skin at a rapid rate.

“It is the presence of these millions of germs and their voracity in devouring what is good in the human skin that rots away the hair, helping to turn it gray or white; that accounts for the fading of the naturally pink tint of the human body; that is responsible for the drying up and wrinkling of the fresh soft skin; that turns the skin eventually to yellow, and that in the case of people with very dirty habits brings on warts and other revolting sores.

“This being the case, the question suggested itself to me. Cannot some means be devised of keeping these microbes from reaching to the human body?

“There is no escape from the invasion of the human body in city localities by these microbes. No amount of clothing can keep them off, as they fall through the pores of the clothing just as a fly would get through the meshes of the net of a fisherman.

“I have made extensive study and experiment to the end of finding some means of clearing the human skin of these deadly microbes, and I have succeeded in inventing a means by which it can be kept free from their ravages. The presence of these microbes being the cause of so much injury, with the removal of the cause of injury there is every reason to believe that the skin of a perfectly clean woman can be made to retain through old age to her death the bloom and freshness of youth, the color and softness of girlhood, and the vigor and pliableness of the skin which every woman possesses until by degrees these wandering microbes fall headlong to her skin and begin the ravages which result in wrinkles, yellowness, gray hair and general puckered-up appearance.

"My method is to bathe the body thoroughly everyday with some disinfectant like alcohol, and as the hair of the body has a particularly attraction for the microbes, a doubly thorough bath should be given everytime.

“Next, the body is thoroughly rubbed with the hands to stir up electricity, and through the feet and hands the whole body is charged with electricity from a battery I myself invented. With this battery I have charged human bodies so successfully that the microbes have been thrown off in a perfect shower to the ground, some of them being thrown as far away as four and five feet. This charging of the hands and feet relieves the skin and hair entirely of the microbes, and the skin can go on living its natural life of softness and freshness. Still other microbes will fall upon it the next day, but these are always removed before twenty-four hours, so that none of them remain long on the skin and in the hair, being removed by the electricity before they have had time to do much ravaging.

“After the body has been charged it is given an electric massage by means of the new current invented by me. The whole affair is finished off by a slight bath of the same disinfectant used in the beginning.”

–Nikola Tesla