Feeling a bit peaky, a little mid-winterish, in need of a boost?

How about a medicated vapour bath? You sit in a cabinet and are gently scalded with steam containing iodine, or chlorine, or even nice, healthy hydrochloric acid.

It may sound less than wholesome these days, but in 1905 it was all the rage.

Bradford was about to open its flagship new health emporium, the Central Baths (later to become the Windsor Baths).

Bradford's health problems usually stemmed from bad diet and from air that was so smoky as to be almost corrosive; but that was the price of commercial success, so the civic fathers looked elsewhere to finds way of promoting well-being.

Swimming was good exercise and the occasional scrub in the tub never hurt anybody, so building baths was a Good Thing. But the Central Baths was to be much more than a pool and a series of tubs. It was to have the latest that science and technology - and the rates - could afford.

Oh, there would be baths all right: Turkish, Russian (a sort of sauna), Sitz (a hip bath), Needle (we'd call it a power shower) and Douche.

Then there were the medicated baths. Apart from the alarming vapour bath already mentioned, there was the Dowsing Radiant Heat and Light Bath which was constructed, reassuringly, of special fire-proof sheeting. In other words the patient might combust, but the actual bath wouldn't.

With a temperature range up to 400F (that's a domestic oven's top setting and then some), the operators must have had to watch the subject very closely; presumably with a large fish-slice handy.

The Solarium, or Electric Sun Bath, looked frighteningly like something in the execution cell in San Quentin. But the principle holds good today, mainly for cosmetic reasons. Sunbeds are common.

The Electric Slipper Bath was regarded as a sovereign remedy for rheumatism, gout and kindred ailments. The sufferer sat in the water and an electric current was passed through. I suppose rising several feet in the air and shrieking could, at a pinch, be regarded as therapeutic...

Some of the ideas were not as wacky as they sounded.

Rickets, the disease which left many children crippled, was caused by a deficiency of Vitamin D, needed to make young bones grow straight.

Vitamins, at the time the Central Baths were opened, were something at which research was only dimly hinting - but it was known that raising children in sunlight helped them avoid rickets.

Sunlight helps the body make Vitamin D if it is not already in the diet. So the sunbath and, later, the sunray treatment room, were a good example of a cure working even when the cause of a disease wasn't known.

It was quite a step forward and indicative of the speed with which Bradford could move when it wanted to.

Just 40 years earlier, the Factory Inspector had chided the place for having not a single place in which working people could wash themselves - Mucky Bradford indeed!

In 1865, Thornton Road baths opened. Inside were 'two swimming ponds for males' - and one for women, about a quarter of the size.

The old Central Baths are still supplying liquid therapy - but now it comes out of a bottle or a pump. The pride of municipal enterprise is now a pub - the Freestyle and Firkin.

'Tuppenny Bloods' and hours of reading heaven...

Mention of the athlete and superhero the Amazing Wilson certainly started something. Mainly it started reader Kevin Bailey off on a jaunt down memory lane to the time when comics contained real words and offered a day's reading, if you didn't go too fast.

Wilson, says Kevin, first came to light when he lifted the massive Longrive Stone near his cave on the Yorkshire moors.

He later, it is thought, helped train Alf Tupper, the Tough of the Track - the bike factory welder and Olympic athlete who trained on fish and chips. It was a far cry from Wilson's herb and berry diet. Mind you, they had something in common - Tupper lived under a railway arch, not far from his mentor's cave.

Kevin remembers with affection the 'Tuppenny Bloods' like Adventure, Wizard, Rover, Hotspur and Skipper, and the 'younger', more picture-led - and longer-lived - comics like Dandy and Beano.

He also remembers the Swap Shop in Whetley Street, off Green Lane, where you could exchange comics and, like anybody brought up on a diet of coloured ink and newsprint, he remembers the occasional clip round the ear for forgetting to bring the coal up while engrossed in the latest adventures of the likes of the V-Men, or the Wolf of Kabul, or the Black Sapper.

"The comics of today? No thanks!" says Kevin. "I'd sooner wallow in nostalgia and think of the pennies and twopences I've spent over the years enjoying winter nights in front of the fire reading my 'blood and thunder' books."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.