The water cure in Scotland : five letters from Dunoon, originally published in the "Aberdeen herald," now reprinted / by J.S. Blackie.

  • Blackie, John Stuart, 1809-1895.
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The water cure in Scotland : five letters from Dunoon, originally published in the "Aberdeen herald," now reprinted / by J.S. Blackie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    definition of quack medical practice be this, that one drug, pro- fessino- to cure all the ills that human flesh is heir to by some mystical virtue, is applied, with a blind indiscrimination, to every morbid temper of the body, then there is no system of therapeutics to which this charge is less applicable than to hy- dropathy. The hydropathist does not profess to cure all diseases. Even in cases of great promise, he knows that the event of the curative process lies fundamentally with nature and vvith God; but, in certain cases, his diagnosis tells him that, if the common drug-treatment is bad, water is nothing better ; there^ fore, he wisely lets the case alone, and tells the patient to keep himself quiet, and let nature work and God rule. As little is it true that, in the cases which his diagnosis allows him to un- dertake, the hydropathist treats all cases indiscriminately. To be sure, in ail cases he applies water more or less in some shape; but the shapes in which this single element of water may be applied are sufficiently various, and its effects, when applied, in the same shape, to persons of different tempera- ments, and suffering from different ailments, are equally so. But, with what conscience can the regular practitioner object to the alleged promiscuous \ise of water in the treatment of various and opposite diseases, when he himself uses mercury and one or two other favourite specifics in almost every ill that can shake the compact human body from its propriety? Sir Astley Cooper, as his words are reported (see Johnstone's Do* mestic Hydropathy, just publishedj, was willing to march the length and breadth of the land with opium in one hand, and calomel in the other, and do battle with death and disease vic- toriously, throwing the various pharmacopoeias, and the 1417 pages of Pereira, into the fire. If these two drugs be of such universal thaumaturgic virtue, why not hot and cold water? Are they to be despised merely because they are not dug out of Styrian rocks, or drained out of Turkish poppies ? merely because they are common ? Shall we say with the old Syrian captain (2 Kings v. 12), Are not Abana and Pharpar rivers of Damascus; may not a man wash in them and be clean? It is not to be doubted that there is a good deal of this feeling lurking at the bottom of many objections to hydropathy, which please themselves in taking a different dress. The thing is too simple, too patent, not sufficiently mysterious. One cannot imagine how so common an element as water should produce such extraordinary effects. Herein the most interested part of the professional world, and the most ignorant part of the pub- lic, instinctively agree. Both are lovers of complexity and mystery. The lawyer loves complex forms of deeds j the di- vine anxiously-compiled creeds; and the medical man a copious