47 



the same time, and during five weeks, not only to 

 frequent pharmaceutic purgatives and water drinking, 

 but she bathed six or seven hours daily. The irri- 

 tation of the skin, produced by these protracted baths, 

 gave to that method the name of corrosio cutis, in 

 German: Hautfresser. In Switzerland it is called la 

 pousse or la poussee. 



David Becher, in his excellent Treatise on the 

 waters of Carlsbad (Neue Abhandlungen von dem 

 Carlsbade, 1772), speaks of the skin-biter, as com- 

 pletely abandoned, and draws his description from 

 Fabian Summer's work : De inventione, descriptione, 

 temperie , viribus et imprimis tisu Thcrmarum D. 

 Caroli IV Imperatoris libellus brevis et utilis. Lips. 

 1571 et 1589. 



The advantages of the internal use of the waters 

 confirmed by so many favourable cases, bathing was 

 gradually neglected, and, though never abandoned, 

 it became at last a secondary part of the treatment. 

 That neglect was felt, and often blamed, by national 

 and foreign physicians of eminence. Habits of com- 

 fort and luxury increasing and spreading rapidly in 

 the principal German watering-places, our patients 

 shewed so little inclination to bathe in uncomfortable 

 and narrow private rooms, that better institutions 

 became indispensable. Maria -Theresia ordered, in 

 1762, to build, at her own expense, a bath-house 

 near the Miihlbrunn, demolished, in 1827, as incom- 

 patible with the increase of visitors , and placed on 

 the opposite side of the street, upon a far better 



