Human Physiology. 



depressing cares, anxieties, and annoyances; and, with the 

 character every physician ought to have, and the means that 

 should be placed at his disposal by the public authorities or 

 benevolent societies, he can give to every patient the moral 

 and physical conditions of cure. 



CHAPTER VII. 

 HYDROPATHY; OR, THE WATER CURE, 



Water Cure Natural Its Wide Repute Its Striking Effects The Wet 

 Sheet Pack Water Cure in Miasmatic and Contagious Diseases Dis- 

 eases of Women Childbirth Turkish Bath and Artificial Heat 

 Dangers of Heroic Treatment Law of Adaptation Invigoration of 

 Cold Sitz Baths Bandages Apoplexy Fasting Cancer Scrofula 

 Obesity Change of Air Consumption Asthma- Will Light 

 Faith. 



THERE is probably no system of treatment adapted to so 

 wide a range of human ailments, so purely natural or physio- 

 logical in its character, so speedy and certain in its results, 

 under judicious management, as the one to which we have 

 already alluded, known as hydropathy or the water cure, now 

 adopted to a greater or less extent, and in more or less of its- 

 principles and applications, by the best practitioners of every 

 school of medicine. The use of water in the treatment of 

 disease is, in its broadest sense, natural. Drooping plants 

 revive when we give them water. Fevered and wounded 

 animals eagerly drink and bathe. A horse has been seen to go 

 several times a-day and hold his wounded neck under a hydrant 

 Water forms ninety-five parts in a hundred of our blood and 

 nerves, and seventy-five hundredths of our muscles and glandu- 

 lar organs three-fourths of our whole bodies. Water is the 

 solvent of all our food, and carries out of the body all its 



