Hydriatic treatment of scarlet fever in its different forms, or how to save, through a systematic application of the water-cure, many thousands of lives and healths, which now annually perish : being the result of twenty-one years' experience, and of the treatment and cure of several hundred cases of eruptive fevers / by Charles Munde.

  • Munde, Carl.
Date:
1857
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hydriatic treatment of scarlet fever in its different forms, or how to save, through a systematic application of the water-cure, many thousands of lives and healths, which now annually perish : being the result of twenty-one years' experience, and of the treatment and cure of several hundred cases of eruptive fevers / by Charles Munde. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    Fear and prejudice—fed by the great mass of physicians, who generally take too much care of their reputation to expose it in the use of a remedy the effects of which are so easily understood by every one—have also been ob- stacles to its promulgation; and the exaggerations of some of its advocates in modern times, bearing for a great part the characteristics of charlatanism, have scared many who might have become converts to Priessnitz's method, to whose genius and good luck we are indebted for the most important, most harmless, and at the same time the the most efficient and most reliable discovery, viz.: 44. priessnitz's method—the wet-sheet-pack, a remedy which, alone, is worth the whole antiphlogistic, diaphoretic, and, indeed, the whole curative apparatus of the profession, in ancient and modern times, for any kind of fevers, and especially for eruptive diseases. Nor did the physicians before Priessnitz know anything about the use of the sitz-bath for affections of the brain in torpid reaction, which in such cases, is the only anchor of safety. In short, water-treatment was, like other methods, an excellent thing for certain symptoms, but not generally and safely applicable in every case. To appreciate the effects of the wet-sheet pack, one must have seen it used for inflammatory fever, when it acts like a charm, frequently removing all the feverish symptoms, and their cause, in a few hours. 45. technicalities of the pack and bath. Let me give you its technicalities, and the rationale of its action: A linen sheet, (linen is a better conductor than cotton,) large enough to wrap the whole person of the patient in it (not too large, however; if there is no sheet of proper size, it should be doubled at the upper end) is dipped in water of a temperature answering to the degree of heat