34 On the Neglect of the Bath Waters. 



this is the name of the new school,) or who have partaken 

 of its streams in the work alluded to, the practice there re- 

 commended is now a very prevailing one throughout great part 

 of the British Isles. 



A doctrine so simple and attractive, and a practice so conve- 

 nient in respect to time and place, cannot fail to prevent invalids 

 from resorting to mineral springs of a tonic nature, and must 

 therefore be enumerated amongst the causes of their present neg- 

 lect in the treatment of diseases. But there is a fashion in all 

 these matters, and though the dominion of blue-pill, is so 

 powerful and pervading now, it cannot be enduring. They 

 •who have seen the downfall of others, not less powerful in their 

 day, perceive that it totters already, and smile at the folly of 

 those who have successively imagined that a bottle of brandy, 

 a phial of laudanum, a lancet, or a box of blue pills, is suffi- 

 cient for the cure of the manifold diseases that afflict the 

 human race. 



Lest your readers should suppose, from the circumstance of 

 my being a resident physician in Bath, that I am attempting to 

 write up the waters, by writing down blue-pill or any other re- 

 medies, I beg to deprecate such a construction upon my endea- 

 vours. My sole object is to restore its wonted character to a 

 neglected remedy of great value, by shewing that, during the 

 last twenty or thirty years, certain speculative views of dis- 

 ease, without any thing save their speciousness to recommend 

 them, have led to the indiscriminate adoption of plans of treat- 

 ment, in which the Bath waters, even as auxiliaries, have been 

 quite overlooked. I am as little disposed to think that the re- 

 medy whose cause I am advocating will cure all diseases, as I 

 am that blue-pill, or the lancet, possess such " charmed " vir- 

 tue. But at some future time I may probably undertake to 

 prove that it is capable, when judiciously administered, of ef- 

 fecting much good, with infinitely less harm, than either of 

 those much^boasted means. 



I would rather caution them against placing implicit belief in 

 those persons who employ, in every disease, any single remedy. 



