Long before modern medicine cleaved mind from body, people went to hammams to heal body and soul. For Muslims and Jews, Romans and Byzantines, hammams were community spaces for purification rites before marriage, puberty or worship. They were sanctums of repose and womb-like serenity, as well as centers for exchange and conversation. In the "Iliad," Ulysses performs ablutions in a hammam. In "A Thousand and One Nights" they are described as paradise on earth. Throughout the Middle East and the Mediterranean, the body was purged of its impurities in hammams to better shine with the divine emanations of the Light. The hammam was, in short, a place where cleanliness really was close to godliness.

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But for centuries hammams were also, and continue to be, celebrated for their therapeutic values -- to treat rheumatism, degenerative joint and spinal problems, respiratory illnesses and all the accumulated aches and pains that enfeeble the body. Some even attribute increased fertility to them (as body temperature rises it's said to affect the ovaries and testes). They are an oasis where the body -- with its dauntless muscles, tendons, bones and arteries -- is revitalized in a sort of thermal Elysium.

When I enter the hammam I am greeted by a woman whose job it is, beyond the dispensing of towels and keys, to extol the virtues of the hammam. She is particularly exhilarated to find out that I am American. "You American women have forgotten how to take care of yourselves," she says. "You are either hard like men, or your bodies fall apart. Here, we Muslims and Europeans pamper ourselves. This is where we return to the womb. This is a vital necessity for women who love their bodies. You must go in. Every woman must go to a hammam." Her insistent enthusiasm is almost disturbing. I have both contempt and admiration for women who've made as a priority the careful preening and primping of the body. And yet while I sit dutifully in the glow of my computer, inflicting on myself the more dubious pursuits of the intellect, I still fret over my own anatomy: my seat-bound butt, my sedentary legs, the woeful lack of sweat in my life.

My hammam experience begins in a dressing room where I am given a pareo (a piece of brightly colored cloth to wrap like a skirt) and plastic sandals and am told to disrobe. I am then escorted downstairs to a dimly lit tiled grotto -- little ficus trees miraculously vibrant in this subterranean world -- and led into a steam room. For a few seconds it is almost impossible to see. I find a tiled bench, lie down and try to get my bearings. The spectral forms of two women are barely visible in the half-light. The air is so thick with steam that it practically funnels into you. It doesn't knock; it breaks down the door and enters, laced with aromatic eucalyptus and laurel, and travels down your pharynx, into your thorax. My clogged respiratory passages immediately open wide and swallow shafts of hot, scented steam. I realize that until this moment my breathing has been shallow: feeble inhalations, indiscernible exhalations. Stop breathing for two minutes and your life is over; the prodigious metronome stops. Here I am obliged to breath deeply, to gorge my body on oxygen, to feed the persistent valve that is my heart, the reckless driver that is my brain, all the blood-pumping circuitry that keeps me alive.

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