Weekly Bulletin of the New York Departmentof Health. American Journal of Public Health. (1914) July; 4 (7): 620-626

On page 622 there is a brief report on the sanitation of the ceremonial baths of the Jewish synagogues. A bacteriologic evaluation of the pools conducted by Dr. Manheimer of Colombia University showed there to be a “serious menace” to the health of the people using the baths.

THOMAS SCHLICH; Medicalization and Secularization: the Jewish Ritual Bath as a Problem of Hygiene (Germany 1820s–1840s), Social History of Medicine, Volume 8, Issue 3, 1 December 1995, Pages 423–442, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/8.3.423

In the 1820s and 1840s the Jewish Ritual bath in Germany was criticized on the basis of medical arguments. Associated with this critique were demands for a change in the traditional Jewish way of life in general, especially as concerning the Jewish religion. The new role assigned to religion can be seen as part of a process of ‘secularization’. The criticism of the ritual bath was justified by medical arguments and entailed a demand for an extension of the medical sphere of competence, and thus formed part of a development described as ‘medicalization’. An historical investigation of the debate on the Jewish ritual bath illuminates the way in which medicalization and secularization were different aspects of the same process of the attribution of complementary circumscribed spheres of medicine and religion.