The water-cure in chronic disease : an exposition of the causes, progress and terminations of various chronic diseases of the digestive organs ... and of their treatment by water, and other hygienic means / by James Manby Gully.

  • Gully, James Manby, 1808-1883.
Date:
[1847?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The water-cure in chronic disease : an exposition of the causes, progress and terminations of various chronic diseases of the digestive organs ... and of their treatment by water, and other hygienic means / by James Manby Gully. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the skin. Sweating should be used every day, or every second day, according to the effects of pain or palpitation it produces in the head and heart; and it may be done either before breakfast, or a couple of hours after it. As the object is not to lose a quantity of perspiratory fluid, but to draw blood to the surface, the patient may go into the cold bath when the moisture has been on the skin eight or ten minutes. Twice in the day he should take a cold sitz bath for thirty minutes ; and after the bowels have been brought into action, the douche may take the ])lace of one of the sitz baths. At this point, also, the sweating may be relaxed for a period. But as the effect of the sweating and douching is to rouse the system to extraordinary efforts, it may be well, now and then, to take a wet-sheet packing, in order to obviate the genera- tion of constitutional irritation, into which those eftbrts may run. To further them, the patient, during the above treatment, should drink water copiously—that is, from seven to ten tumblers daily, by which he both quickens the chemico-vital changes of the body, and dilutes the morbid secretions of a diseased membrane. Indeed, water-drinking is a very important part of the treatment of mucous dyspepsia, in which the mass of the blood is always more or less diseased, as a consequence of bad gastric juice and imperfect digestion, not to mention the drugs that have been absorbed into it during years, and taint its current. hleantime, this copious water-drinking, and these long sitz baths, demand a good amount of exercise to promote the absorption of the one, and to produce re-action after the latter. And, in this form of dyspepsia, walking should be practised for an hour, or more, before each meal, and may be beneficially varied by horse exercise. Sedentary, silent, and idle practices, are most prejudicial here. Even in the house, the mind of the patient should be occupied with conversation, games that interest without stretching the attention, and books of fancy rather than philosophy. The diet must be regulated by the amount of appetite, especially at the outset of the treatment, wdien it is, for the most part, very deficient, and is even replaced by loathing of food. It would be absurd, in such case, to put strong food, or much of any kind of aliment into the stomach, when there is neither muscular movement enough to aid in, nor healthy gastric juice to effect its digestion.