JULY 379 



woman lying on the floor with a piece of similar wood 

 under her little head. Perhaps without this photograph 

 from the far east the 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 establish- 

 ments 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 l'Abb6 

 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 



