DIVISION TENTH. 



WATER CURE-HYDROPATHY. 



BY J. D. CRAIG, M. D., GRADUATE OP NEW YORK HYGIEO-THERAPEUTIC 



COLLEGE. 



Dr. Shew, who was one of the earliest writers on Hydropathy, 

 or the water-cure, like all adherents of a new faith exhibited his 

 zeal by the statement that the " system which has for its medica- 

 ments water, air, exercise, and diet, is the greatest of all medical 

 improvements, which is destined not only to make the members of 

 communities their own physicians for the most part, but to miti- 

 gate, in an unprecedented manner, the extent, the pains and the 

 perils of disease." 



If this prophecy has been realized only in part, and that in a 

 more limited degree than is deserved, the reason is to be found in 

 the exaggerated expectations and statements of the early adherents 

 of hydropathy, by which the therapeutic range of hygienic meas- 

 ures was overestimated, and other remedial agencies depreciated, 

 together with the too frequent misapplication of the hydropathic 

 appliances through inexperience and consequent ignorance of their 

 power for harm on the part of the laity, and often, it must be con- 

 fessed, by the practitioners who were supposed to be skilled in their 

 use. 



Naturally all this produced a reaction, but nevertheless the 

 influence of Priessnitz's systems has had a very important part in 

 the reformation in medicine that has taken place in the last thirty 

 or forty years. The study of hygiene received an impetus througn 

 the " water-cure system " in the days of its organized aggressiveness 

 that laid the foundation for the system of prevention of disease that 

 prevails to so great an extent in all schools of medicine at the pres- 

 ent day. 



The use of cold water in the treatment of disease is now very 

 generally discountenanced in this country, for the reason that experi- 

 ence has shown that persons of nervous organizations, such as 

 prevail in America, have not the reactive power of those whose 

 muscular systems predominate. 



To most patients a tepid, warm, or even hot bath is found to 

 be much more effective as well as pleasanter, and accordingly the 

 cold douches, packs, showers and plunges of thirty years ago have 



