More on Bathhouses

The commenter of my Hot Springs post prompted today’s post. She compares those bathhouses to hammams, which she rightly notes are now being offered on modern spa menus.

According to some of the reading I’ve done, hammams originated in northern Africa and date back to the 1500s. Though modeled on the old European and Middle Eastern traditions, the similarities between the Hot Springs bathhouses in Arkansas versus those ancient practices around the world, seems to center on intent: health versus relaxation. Which, by the way, regarding the spa experience, Americans today still seem on the fence about whether it should be one or the other. It’s a conundrum because the vast majority of treatments on modern spa menus derive almost exclusively from ancient practices, which have therapeutic value.

Oddly, in the case of bathhouses versus hammams, things are flipped. Hammams are and were a social hub, communal places to go to relax and hang out with friends and make friends with strangers, as you took your ablutions, steamed, purified and replenished your body and capped the experience with a massage. This was the therapy as relaxation and a great way to start or end any day, not to mention as a midday booster.

Not so in the case in the bathhouses, such as the one I visited in Hot Springs. Those existed to provide therapeutic relief for sick people. They called it “the water cure” your visit was solely intended to improve, or hopefully vanquish, your existing diseases, by giving in to the 4,000 year-old thermal waters believed to have properties. The environment of the bathhouse was clinical, stark and very very serious. In many cases I’m sure people benefited greatly. But these places were the haunts for the likes of the health crusader John Harvey Kellogg of Corn Flakes
cereal fame. It’s said he was a great surgeon, but for every good idea he had (vegetarianism, inventing the electric blanket) he had his share of bad ones (the female orgasm was abnormal but nothing a good hit of carbolic acid couldn’t rectify).

Though a couple of old Turkish baths have recently reopened in Chicago, I haven't gathered my flip flops and taken the plunge. The closest I’ve come to a hammam in the Midwest is actually a Korean bathhouse called Paradise. It’s a blast, a real scene and strongholf for the Asian community in Chicago's Albany Park. But you can't be faint of heart if you want to hold your own to the Korean women who frequent the place; they take their relaxation seriously so it’s not for the squeamish. But the prices can’t be beat—$20, massages are extra.

In fact, now that I think about it, I may have visited Paradise with the commenter who prompted this post, and who, by the way, happens to be my friend.

I’d love to hear more comments about other hydrotherapies you have known and loved so don’t be a stranger.

The photo, top left, comes courtesy of cyberbohemia.com