Figure 1.Portable Bath’s illustration.

The Portable Bath was designed by Santorio Santori (1561–1636), known as the father of quantified medicine and experimental physiology, in 1610 (1). Without getting out of bed, the patient wears a leather suit that is filled with water and essential oils by an assistant. The suit is shaped like a long bag with a funnel opening at the top and a valve at the end, allowing the water to be easily poured out at the end of the bath and the patient to be dried without discomfort. This invention exemplifies the early union of medicine, technology, and patient care. Portable Bath’s illustration, which we used on the cover of this issue (Figure 1), was published in Johannes Schultes’s Armamentarium Chirurgicum (1595–1645)(2).