The cold-water cure, its use and misuse examined / [Herbert Mayo].

  • Herbert Mayo
Date:
1845
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The cold-water cure, its use and misuse examined / [Herbert Mayo]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    easily rubs off, leaving a surface which discharges serum, and then dries and heals. Sometimes this rash spreads over the whole of the body and limbs, the skin affected itching and burning, and being made raw with rubbing once or twice in twenty-four hours. This affection does no manner of good, and the sooner it is got rid of the better. For this purpose the general treatment may re- quire to be suspended, and the patient had better bathe once or twice, or oftener, in tepid water. If any one part is particularly troublesome, cold compresses, changed every five minutes, will ease and remove the burning and itching there. In other instances an eruption is produced looking like lichen, with which a pustular eruption may be mixed. If this does not itch and burn at night, and so disturb the patient’s rest, it is of no consequence, and may not require any suspension of the treatment which has pro- voked it. Where there have been boils or abscesses, or large pustules, these on opening sometimes spread into irritable ulcers. The latter must be treated, not with water dress- ing, but either with common salve or poultices. A curious feature it is in the high pressure water-cure, that old scars burn and throb, and recently healed ulcers ulcerate anew, showing the extent to which the balance of nutrition and the agencies of growth are disturbed and searched and put in commotion. Then the ingenious fiction has been advanced, that there still existed disease in these ulcers, which is got rid of by their opening; and that then only, when they have so ulcerated and been healed anew, are they soundly healed, and the patient well of whatever they were at first. This is, I presume, nonsense. 5. After all, perhaps the most truly critical events pro- duced by hydropathy, are increase and alteration of certain secretions. A loose state of the bowels sometimes supervenes and lasts for several weeks. As long as the motions con- tinue fecal, and are unattended with griping and heat, this may be viewed as beneficial; when the looseness degenerates into diarrhoea, it had better be stopped.