Читать книгу Every Man His Own Doctor - R. T. Claridge - Страница 9

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It promotes the vital energies, quickens the action of the absorbents, strengthens the nerves, allays irritation, promotes healthy action of the vital organs.

The extreme vessels deposit healthy particles, which the absorbents remove.

Dr. Gibbs, in his “Letters from Gräfenberg,” states that water, applied hydropathically, acts in the following ways:—

1st. By the more rapid liberation of caloric.

2nd. By accelerating the change of tissues.

3rd. By constringing the capillaries.

4th. By increasing nervous power.

5th. By restoring tone to the skin.

6th. By derivation.

7th. By forwarding the elimination of morbific matter; or, in other words, as a sedative, alterative, tonic, stimulant, derivative, and counter-irritant.

And taken internally, it acts—

1st. As a solvent, and contributes to the greater part of the transformations.

2nd. Gives tone to the stomach.

3rd. Promotes the secretions and excretions, particularly from the skin, bowels, and kidneys.

4th. It is a most important and indispensable element in the blood; and “its partial application,” says Dr. Johnson, “acts by determining the force of oxygen from one part to another; it produces all the effects of bleeding and blistering—except the pain,” and he might have added, the debility.

The hydropathic treatment causes the elimination of all foreign matters from the body, and thereby promotes contraction, without which there can be no health, which Dr. Billing has shewn to demonstration; he states “that the proximate cause of all disease is relaxation and enlargement of the capillaries: the indication of a cure, therefore, is to constringe the capillaries, and cause them to contract, and resume their healthy state.”

“As all organic action is contraction, all organic or animal strength depends upon the power of the different parts of the body to contract.” If it be true, that the effect to be brought about in the treatment of all disease is to unload and constringe the capillaries, how can this be better achieved than by the sweating or wet-sheet process, and the cold bath; Dr. Johnson says—“The hydropathic treatment, which unloads the capillaries by sweating, and constringes them by cold, is clearly an efficient substitute for bleeding, purging, vomiting, uva ursi, digitalis, antimony, mercury, arsenic, nitrate of silver, sulphate of copper, iodine, iron, and multitudes of other remedies, enumerated by Dr. Billing, merely by their power of unloading and constringing the capillaries.”

Priessnitz’s theory:—

1st. That by the hydropathic treatment, the bad juices are brought to, and discharged by, the skin.

2nd. A new circulation is given to the diseased or inactive organs, and better juices infused into them.

3rd. All the functions of the body are brought into a normal state, not by operating upon any particular function, but upon the whole.

If these are the results of hydropathy—and that they are so, has never been disputed; nay, the truth is even proved by the following great medical authority unconnected with the water cure: it must be admitted that the sooner drugs are dispensed with the better.

British and Foreign Medical Review, and Quarterly Journal, October, 1846.—Extract.

“The water cure is a stomachic, since it invariably increases the appetite.

“It is a local calefacient in the wet sheet covered by a dry one.

“It is a derivative; cold friction at one part, by exciting increased action there, producing corresponding diminution elsewhere; the compress frequently acting, if not like a blister, at least like a mustard poultice.

“It is a local as well as a general counter-irritant.

“It is essentially alterative in the continual removal of old matter: its renewal is shewn in the maintenance of the same weight.

“An important hydropathic principle is, that almost all its measures are applied to the surface. One of the most formidable difficulties with which the ordinary physician has to contend is, that nearly all his remedies reach the point to which they are directed through one channel.

“The only means of relieving certain diseases is by inundating the stomach and bowels with foreign and frequently to them pernicious substances.

“Hydropathy employs a system of most extensive energetic general and local counter irritation.

“A fifth physiological feature of hydropathy is the number of coolings. The generation of caloric has been traced to its right source. It results from the burning up of waste matter, which by accumulation would become injurious.

“It is singular enough that almost all arguments used against cold bathing are the strongest theoretical arguments in its favor. Dr. Baynard, a most sarcastic writer, gives us the following anecdote:—

“Here a demi-brained doctor of more note than nous, asked, in the amazed agony of his half-understanding, how ’twas possible that an external application should affect the bowels, and cure pain within? ‘Why doctor,’ quoth an old woman standing by, ‘by the same reason that, being wet-shod or catching cold from without, should give you the gripes and pain within.’

“If a rude exposure of the surface to cold and wet is capable of producing internal disease, there is no doubt that a close relation exists between these agents and the morbid conditions of internal parts.”

After devoting upwards of thirty pages to prove the value of Hydropathy, the reviewer sums up as follows:—

“After what has been said and written in favor of Hydropathy.—Judgment must therefore be entered by default against its opponents, and hydropathy is entitled to the verdict of harmlessness, since cause has never been shown to the contrary.”