On the curative effects of baths and waters : being a handbook to the spas of Europe / Including a chapter on the treatment of phthisis by baths and climate, by Rohden. An abridged translation, with notes, ed. by Hermann Weber.

  • Braun, Julius, 1821-1878.
Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the curative effects of baths and waters : being a handbook to the spas of Europe / Including a chapter on the treatment of phthisis by baths and climate, by Rohden. An abridged translation, with notes, ed. by Hermann Weber. 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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    USE OF COLD WATER. 6 and especially of their characteristic constituents and of the gases contained in them, did not exist before the third decade of our century, and was first established by the labours of Berzelius and Struve. There was thus no scientific basis for the employment Practice of and explanation of baths; and if notwithstanding, in p^st Germany especially, a balneotherapeutic practice existed, it could only be founded on an empiricism which connected its experience less with the unknown or erroneously ex- plained physical and chemical properties of the waters than with the names of different fashionable springs ; and thus we find, in this tolerably sound empiricism of the Hippocratic physicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, indications resulting from experience, for Wiesbaden, Ems, Karlsbad, Teplitz, Pyrmont, and Aix- la-Chapelle, but not for salt baths, alkaline, neutral, or sulphur-baths, and chalybeate waters. As in the num- ber of springs then used, small as it is compared with that of our own time, the representatives of almost all charac- teristic groups are to be found, the means of healing possessed by our forefathers, though not so numerous as our own, were nevertheless almost equally complete. The chalybeate springs alone, being more simple in their com- position, and their effect being produced by a single in- gredient, were universally open to theory, and were there- fore most widely used in practice ; this was increased by the commonly current notion of ' strengthening,' the need of which naturally forces itself upon the sick, and which must be the final result of all cure and recovery; and thus in the last century, for example, in North Germany, a journey to the baths was almost synonymous with a journey to Pyrmont—an over-estimation of chalybeate springs, which has prevailed even in our own century, and which has been strikingly styled by Hauck an error of the age. Long before analysis was attempted there was an effort Use of made to remedy the first fundamental want, namely, the cold water, investigation of the physiological effect of the elementary processes ; but it is remarkable that, after the first notable experiments and investigations upon the effect of cold u 2