The water cure : a lecture on the principles of hydropathy, delivered before the Council of the Hydropathic Society, at the rooms of the Society of Arts, London, March 23, 1843 / by Edward Johnson.

  • Johnson, Edward, 1785-1862
Date:
[1844]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The water cure : a lecture on the principles of hydropathy, delivered before the Council of the Hydropathic Society, at the rooms of the Society of Arts, London, March 23, 1843 / by Edward Johnson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    2S pro tanto, certainly to be preferred. Neither is the agency of cold water deficient in power; for, when carried to an extreme, it can, like bleeding, produce insensibility and death. The effect of cold, in determining the force of oxygen from one part of the body to another, sufficiently illustrates the necessity of knowing in what part or organ of the body the disease is situated. For, not knowing this, the practitioner might apply his local baths to the wrong part, and so determine the force of oxygen to the diseased organ, instead of from it; and thus augment the malady instead of relieving it. I now come to that other large class of diseases called chronic. And these I shall subdivide into two smaller divisions—viz., into those which depend upon weakness, or deficiency of living power; and those in which there is something or other—some foreign or morbid matters—present in the system, and whose presence constitutes the proximate cause of the disease. It has been stated at the early part of this lecture, and the statement was supported by quotations from the very highest authority on this subject. Dr. Justus Liebig, that the ultimate cause of all force in the animal economy is the change of matter —that series of changes which the food undergoes until it becomes fixed in, and a part of, the solid organism; and that other series of changes which it undergoes, and which separates it from the solid organism again, and finally expels it from the system, in the shape of those lifeless compounds of oxygen, called breath, perspiration, &c.—and that the energies of the body must ever be proportional to the energy and rapidity with which this double series of changes of matter are carried on. If this be so, then it is siifficiently obvious that the essential nature of weak- ness consists in the diminished activity with which this change of matter is effected—and that whatever can accelerate the change of matter is precisely the very remedy to which we must look, for the cure of all such diseases as depend upon weakness —that is, upon a diminished activity in the change of matter. Now, it has been already shown, that the effect of cold is to diminish the resistance offered by the vital force to the action of oxygen. The living animal body,^^ says Liebig, exhibits its peculiar manifestations of vitality only at certain temperatures, c 2 i
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