somewhat
discountenanced. The use of hot and cold baths was now, however,
beginning to be established in Paris and elsewhere, and the
bathing establishments at the great European health resorts were
also beginning to be put on the orderly footing which is now
customary. When Casanova, in the middle of the eighteenth
century, went to the public baths at Berne he was evidently
somewhat surprised when he found that he was invited to choose
his own attendant from a number of young women, and when he
realized that these attendants were, in all respects, at the
disposition of the bathers. It is evident that establishments of
this kind were then already dying out, although it may be added
that the customs described by Casanova appear to have persisted
in Budapest and St. Petersburg almost or quite up to the present.
The great European public baths have long been above suspicion in
this respect (though homosexual practices are not quite
excluded), while it is well recognized that many kinds of hot
baths now in use produce a powerfully stimulating action upon the
sexual system, and patients taking such baths for medical
purposes are frequently warned against giving way to these
influences.

The struggle which in former ages went on around bathing
establishments has now been in part transferred to massage
establishments. Massage is an equally powerful stimulant to the
skin and the sexual sphere,--acting mainly by friction instead of
mainly by heat,--and it has not yet attained that position of
general recognition and popularity which, in the case of bathing
establishments, renders it bad policy to court disrepute.

Like bathing, massage is a hygienic and therapeutic method of
influencing the skin and subjacent tissues which, together with
its advantages, has certain concomitant disadvantages in its
liability to affect the sexual sphere. This influence is apt to
be experienced by individuals of both sexes, though it is perhaps
specially marked in women. Jouin (quoted in Paris _Journal de
Medecine_, April 23, 1893) found that of 20 women treated by
massage, of whom he made inquiries, 14 declared that they
experienced voluptuous sensations; 8 of these belonged to
respectable families; the other 6 were women of the _demimonde_
and gave precise details; Jouin refers in this connect