370 MORE POT-POURRI 



use of this primitive pillow from the Lake villages might 

 have remained an unexplained curiosity. 



I spent a few days in the neighbourhood of Geneva to 

 see some friends in one of the water-cure establishments 

 so common now on the Continent part hotel, part cure- 

 very different from those primitive water-cures started in 

 the early half of this century by Preissnitz at Graafenberg. 

 I picked up on an old bookstall some years ago a curious 

 little pamphlet by Bulwer Lytton, called '.Confessions of a 

 Water Patient/ He described how he had found his faith 

 in the system strengthen, but he shrank from the terrors 

 of a long journey to Silesia, ' the rugged region in which 

 the probable lodging was a labourer's cottage, where the 

 sulky hypochondriac would murmur and growl over a 

 public table spread with no tempting condiments.' It is 

 the modern luxury of hotel life which, I think, now 

 militates so much against all these cures. The patients 

 have two large hotel dinners of doubtfully wholesome 

 food, and lie about all day on luxurious chairs. This is 

 very different from the return to primitive life, an essential 

 part of the cure in the old system, and which in modern 

 days has been better practised by 1'Abbe Kneipp than by any 

 other that I have heard of. Now luxury and self-indulgence 

 hold the poor modern, civilised patients in their grip 

 wherever they go, and often they return no better than they 

 went, in spite of douches and baths innumerable. 



I must confess I found it rather trying coming from 

 Florence to a hydropathic establishment in Switzerland. 

 Illnesses, and especially what for want of a better name are 

 called nerve-illnesses, are from their very obscurity quite 

 extraordinarily depressing, and bring prominently forward 

 the eternal injustice of Nature. Looking out of my window 

 at the gravelled yard and the heavy grove of trees gave me 

 the feeling that I might be in a private lunatic asylum, or 

 even in a prison, though I have never lived in either. The 



