310 
EDITORIAL OBSERVATIONS. 
forms, have been coeval, if not antecedent, to all other modes of treating 
disease; but even in the more complex modifications of it, which 
Preisnitz has brought into such vogue in our own day, it may claim an 
ante-Christian antiquity. Musa Antonius, the freedman and physician 
of Augustus, had the distinguished merit of curing his imperial master of 
a dangerous disease by prescribing the use of the cold bath. He was 
munificently rewarded for the cure he had wrought, and honoured with a 
brazen statue, which, by order of the Roman senate, was to be placed 
near that of iEsculapius. The grateful emperor, moreover, exempted 
him from all taxes, and, as we may presume, vaunted his skill, and re¬ 
commended him to his imperial household as the only physician to be 
trusted; at any rate, he was called upon to treat the emperor’s nephew 
and son-in-law, Marcellus,‘who had been publicly proclaimed his successor. 
Here, unfortunately for the patient and the system, hydropathy killed, 
and did not cure ; the poor youth, who was only eighteen, died, chilled 
to death by the cold-water douches administered to him by Musa; and 
with him died the system, which M. Fournier remarks it has taken twenty 
centuries to revive and restore to its former prestige. The cold-water 
cure, had, however, a short-lived notoriety in Nero’s time, when the 
Marseille physician Charmis douched and drenched his patients most suc¬ 
cessfully with cold water, and in other respects prescribed medicines and 
modes of treatment not in use among his contemporaries.” 
Even clairvoyance, table-turning, spirit-rapping, and 
other absurdities of the present day., appear to have been 
known in olden time, and practised by the artful and 
designing; exciting, too, the same wonder and belief then 
as now. 
We have been desirous to write on this subject—although 
it may be that our extracts have been somewhat too long— 
lest an expression made by us in our last leader should 
have been misunderstood. We there said, “ As a compact 
body, we must resolve in our own strength to c go on.’ ” 
From this some might have inferred that we seek no 
assistance or co-operation. Ear from it, we are no friends 
whatever to isolation; indeed, we believe, fully believe, in 
the advantages derivable from union. Moreover, the sciences 
have a co-relation—the one aids the other. It would be, 
therefore, just as consistent to hope to maintain the in¬ 
tegrity of a chain by the removal of one of its connecting 
links, as for any division of science to make advancement 
by insulation. All the inventions of physical science are 
united together, and by their nature tend to bring mankind 
into alliance with one another. We have been likewise told 
not to bury our talent in a napkin, nor burn our lamp in a 
sepulchre, like the old Bosicrusians. 
Again, when we spoke of “ our own strength,” we meant it 
