Looks like most of the light in this room is natural from the skylight. Actually, this place is not near as scary looking as some operating rooms seen on Shorpy in the past.

My mother was born in Ypsilanti in the 1920s. I wonder if it was in a "spa" like this one? I rather hope not.

An exclusive spa remote from the prying eyes of society might be just the place for a discreet scrape doctor to perform "procedures."

A few weeks taking the waters to recuperate, and the lady can return home, rested and rejuvenated, with plenty of fresh euphemisms for all her friends and admirers.

Or it could all be completely innocent, in a "Road to Wellville" sort of way.

Is it oval or half-moon? I've never seen one of this design. I suppose it just never caught on.

Spa, or operating room, either way I'm glad I live now and not 110 years ago. Nevertheless, people survived and here we all are - too many of us.

I notice that in a lot of these old photos, be it an operating room, pharmacy, candy store, bicycle shop, or whatever, the floors are often a wreck like this one, filthy, or both. People didn't pay much attention to such details, I guess. Another reason to be happy it's 2010.

I wonder what people will think of our operating rooms in 110 years.

This has got to be the creepiest spa ever! It really gives me the shivers. All old medical photographs look so scary.

It looks like this room could be set up for what my mom called a high colonic. Two coffeepot-looking containers setting on gas burners for warming water. Hanging is a container with a rubber tube and an unrevealed apparatus on the other end. The rubber ring on the treatment table appears could have the ability to collect whatever treatment resultant may become evedent directing it toward the collection pot on the stool. The only thing lacking is John Harvey Kellogg singing "Moon River."

Yikes! A drainage ring on the operating table, long scalpels on the instrument table, something floating in the specimen jar, and carbolic acid was probably the only antibiotic available to sterilize instruments and the surgical site. At this time surgery was often the only option available to cure serious or chronic infections and often resulted in new infections.

If that irrigation pitcher with tubing, and the drainage donut are for what I think they're for, I'd take the ether!

Wow, that old knob & tube wiring is really interesting. The lamps
are in series like the old Christmas tree lights that all stop working
when a single bulb blows.

If this is a spa, I'm a monkey's uncle. The can of ether is a clue; so are the huge surgical knives on the table plus what looks like at least one surgical curette--the kind used for D&Cs. My guess is that this is a delivery room. See the basin on the table, with a drape leading into a jar on the stool? Might have been used to catch blood and amniotic fluid.

But, speaking as a physician, I don't think this is a "spa."

I can't help but think that elevated container had something to do with enemas or some such tomfoolery as that.

I don't think I like all the gravity vessels with hoses.

I'm not entirely certain I want to know what kind of "treatments" went on in this room. Something along the lines of a very thorough cleaning, so to speak?

Maybe this one should have been titled "Taking the Waters," what with the oversupply of enema equipment in the room. And shared rooms for such procedure?

what appears to be some sort of rubber incontinence device on the table.

Lots of knives and IV stuff. The spa from hell or an operating room. I say operating room!