Water versus hydropathy, or, An essay on water, and its true relations to medicine / by Henry Hartshorne.

  • Hartshorne, Henry, 1823-1897.
Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Water versus hydropathy, or, An essay on water, and its true relations to medicine / by Henry Hartshorne. 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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    never sufficiently energetic in any mode of applica- tion for it to be depended upon alone in any violent disease. If mere hygienic regulations, regimen and diet, are of vast importance in the prevention and cure of dangerous, nay, of all diseases, how can great value be denied to an agent which in some form is useful in our attack upon almost every affection, as palliative, and often as a really curative means? The sum of human happiness is diminished as much by lesser, and more frequent, as by greater ills; few of the greater arise indeed, except as consequences of the less, when neglected, qr beyond our power to remove. And in some applications, water is a means of very great energy, for use or for abuse. The design of this essay is to oppose the latter, by a sketch of the authorized limits of the former. We might infer a priori the importance of water as related to hygiene and therapeutics, from the facts of what may be called its natural history. Constitu- ting in inorganic matter, three-fourths of the surface of the globe;* and in man three-fourths of his whole * An interesting subject is the constant supply of water to its vast accumulations and expenditures, as lakes, rivers, and such masses as the great Niagara Falls, &c. The theory of central heat is thus ap- plied by a writer in the Polytechnic Magazine to the explanation of hot springs, as well as to that of earthquakes, as similarly caused. We well know, says he, the ease with which water descends be- tween the strata of any rock,—and if it arrives, as it may very easily do, between the secondary strata to the point even where water boils, namely less than half a mile, steam will be generated. This will