Five Minutes' Advice on the Bath Waters

Five Minutes' Advice was a book published in 1843 by Sims & Sons. The general idea was to promote the well-being the roman baths and spas in the city of Bath could provide. It goes into depth about how rejuvenating and revitalising the actual Baths, waters, products and overall experience were, explaining reasons, and giving examples. The book also advertises how the Bath experience can be brought to the home, if the right products are purchased. It also includes actual advertisements, which advertise various pills and potions.

From the image, I would suppose that this is definitely not a modern piece of text, due to the layout (i.e; the big fancy 'D'), and the rather proper use of language e.g; 'and to their successful employment...', 'advantages which are daily experienced'. This differs from modern health, well-being and medical scripts, as the author's use of explanations are very vague, and although it gives 'explanations' to support what 'facts' it contains, these are still very vague, and are probably the result of guesswork. Modern equivalents of Five Minutes' Advice are all facts, that are simple and very clearly understandable, so anyone can read them for medical advice, and they are all backed up by scientific experiments and discoveries, with references. People have taken this essentiality of easy-access to such a high level, that today, most of what you would find in a book is on the internet, so you can find out what you need to, straight away. Five Minutes' Advice does have some sense in what its purpose was, to advertise the roman Baths. And in its day, when medical science was nearly non-existent, it's content was easily believed by the unknowing public. Therefore, Five Minutes' Advice was altogether rather smart, as it lured people to the Baths and to their products even when nobody knew what was true or false.