earth bath

Meanings

1. A mud bath.
2. A bath or therapeutic treatment in which the body is buried or immersed in earth, as practiced in James Graham’s 18th-century "earth-bathing" therapy.

1. Alternative form of earth bath.

1. Alternative form of earth bath.

Etymology

Sense 2: from earth + bathing. Widely understood to have been coined Scottish physician James Graham in the late 1780s or early 1790s. * Possibly coined earlier by Gerard van Swieten in 1765 in references to practices found in the Kingdom of Granada (writing "per balneum terrae," Latin for "bath of earth").