The airbath as a means of healing and hardening the body / by Dr. Heinrich Lahmann.

  • Lahmann, H. (Heinrich), 1860-1905.
Date:
1901
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The airbath as a means of healing and hardening the body / by Dr. Heinrich Lahmann. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    How can the body escape punishment when such heavy demands are made upon it daily and it is nervously irritated and insufficiently supplied with necessary calorifics! Only some few persons can stand the daily cold water treatment. They are of phlegmatic character and suffer from over feeding and excessive use of alcohol. It is always a great mistake when people lay down general rules based upon indiscriminate observation. It was also a fault that Preissnitz committed when he applied indiscriminately to every body the same application of his remedy primitively designed for strong peasants, and the same criticism may be offered to Kneipp who experimented upon himself and the well nourished frames of his colleagues: at least such treatment is a mistake in this age of high pressure and nervous excitement. In all these doings it would appear as if knowledge was replaced by enthusiasm and so one enthusiast copies into his books the nonsense of another. At times one cannot help wishing that all these books on water cures and natural treatment were burnt for there is more of falseness than truth about them. More harm than good in our opinion, to put it mildly, is done by following these systems. The public is absolutely without the means of truly discriminating as to collective or individual cases. It is only by a thorough investigation of the natural living conditions in schools that we can attain the power to redress the evil. The rules of health must be> brought home to children in their play. When the adult begins to pay attention to the preservation of health he is apt, in our times of high pressure, to become a fanatic and to prejudice his own and his childrens' health. , The care of health does not begin with cold water nor is the treatment by water the beginning of the cure of invalids, at least not in chronic cases. But in certain acute feverish conditions the water treatment takes a foremost place. Man is not an amphibian. His proper element is air, not water. The relation of mankind to the ambiant air in which they live forms the most important chapter in the book of health. Everybody agrees when the value of pure air is advocated and yet what a ery is raised when in an over- crowded room a window or a ventilator is opened! Why this difference between theory and practice? As a mattes of fact most educated people spend the day in unventilated rooms — often foul with tobacco-smoke and pass the night in inhaling an impure atmosphere due to closed windows in their bedrooms! Whence comes this sadly bad practice? Are