Hydropathy, or, The water-cure : its principles, modes of treatment, &c., illustrated with many cases : compiled chiefly from the most eminent English authors on the subject / by Joel Shew.

  • Shew, Joel, 1816-1855.
Date:
1844
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hydropathy, or, The water-cure : its principles, modes of treatment, &c., illustrated with many cases : compiled chiefly from the most eminent English authors on the subject / by Joel Shew. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    every-day practice. The administration of pure clean water cannot certainly be attended with more danger. That, by thousands, astounding cures have been performed in the treatment, no one can question. And so was it in tractoration. But there the mistake was as to the how. The objector who would class the water-cure with that delusion has not examined the subject—does not even know what the water-cure is. In the case of tractoration, where the cures were performed, the subject exercised unbounded faith in the mysterious agency of the tractors. It is true, too, that Priessnitz inspires his patients with confidence and courage, and so must any and every practitioner of the healing art, to obtain success. But more. Let the objector, professional, or non-professional, get a little way into the secrete of the water-cure (for to him as yet they are secrets.) If he be an invalid, let him awhile, leave, of every kind, his vile narcotics and stimulants—in every respect, his hours keep regularly. Let him daily wash and be clean, and be throughout regular and temperate in his meals, and in all his habits. Let him di- minish, if need be, the amount of fluids in the body, by most profuse per- spiration, or, by the wet sheet, reduce the temperature of the body, and the velocity of the circulation and heart's action, to any required extent. Let him purify the blood, not by any of the thousand-and-one of the nostrums of the quack, or of the multitudinous forms of drugs innumer- able, but by the cleansing effect of Nature's own best pure fluid. Let him, if he can command courage, go to the bath, to the douche; climb among the hills and breathe freely the pure mountain air of heaven—and all in proportion to his increasing strength ; let him be cheerful always ; and at evening, according to his inclinations, let him join in some of the 60cial exercises—the music and the dance; and when in time he finds his body has become amazingly strengthened, and his mind active, cheerful, vigorous and blithesome, and that his old ailments inveterate are cast off, it will be a thing not easy to convince him that all is de- lusion—a work of the imagination. By this time he finds that though he will, as if to bring spirits from the vasty deep, against the effects of the water-cure, it would be willing in vain. There is at least something of physical truth in it. A greater mistake cannot be than to class this with the tractors, Sir Kenelm Digby's sympathetic powder, or Hahneman's decillionth grain doses of charcoal, flint, silica or cuttle fish juice, made