Bathtub

The hydrotherapy room at Callan Park has a single communal bathtub at its centre, set into a white-tiled floor. The bath is large, deep enough for full-body immersion, and ringed with low ceramic kerbs. Three high windows on the far wall let in flat daylight. The walls are tiled in white glazed ceramic, the grout darkened by decades of moisture. Brass fittings around the bath are tarnished but still in place. The flooring slopes very slightly toward a central drain. The room is otherwise empty. The acoustics in the room are unusually flat, dampened by the tile.

Hydrotherapy was a standard treatment in nineteenth-century mental health practice, used to calm agitated patients and treat various conditions through immersion in warm or cool water. The bath at Callan Park was used for that purpose from the hospital's opening in 1878 through to well into the twentieth century. As psychiatric medicine moved on from hydrotherapy as a primary treatment, rooms like this one were used less often. After Callan Park closed as a working hospital in 2008, the room was locked. The bath in this photograph is original to the hospital. The plumbing is no longer connected. The room is now locked behind a door that is itself locked behind another.