The domestic practice of hydropathy / by Edward Johnson ; assisted by his sons, Walter and Howard Johnson.

  • Johnson, Edward, 1785-1862.
Date:
1856
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The domestic practice of hydropathy / by Edward Johnson ; assisted by his sons, Walter and Howard Johnson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    nervous system is often very remarkable, and approaclies more nearly than any other phenomenon with wliich I am acqnainted, to electro-motive or galvanic agency. Whether the opinions I have here given as to the modus operandi of the wet sheet packing, and other particular hydropatliic operations, be true or false, nothing but time, the ti-uth-teller, can satisfactorily expound. In the mean- wliile I offer them as probabilities merely. But that the skin does possess and exercise the power of extruding from the system, tlu'ough its pores, poisonous matters which have found their way into the blood, is capable of proof by actual demonstration. Take, for instance, a patient who is known to be suffering under the poison of lead. Place him in a wooden tub, containmg thirty gallons of water. That the skin is full of the poison of lead can now be proved by the addition of four ounces of the sulphuret of potassium. The skin will immediately assume a dark brown or blackish appeai-ance, owing to the conversion of the oxide, or carbonate of lead (or in what- ever other form the lead may have been deposited on the skin) into the brown or black sulphuret of lead, througli the chemical action of the sulphuret of potassium. If now this blackish substance be scrubbed clean off the skin, by soap and water and a strong flesh brush; and the patient be again immersed and again scrubbed, and so on, until immer- sion no longer darkens his skin; and if, after the lapse of a few days, he be agam placed in a similar bath; his skin vidll again become blackish brown, demonstrating that more lead has been thro^vn out of the blood upon the skin. In persons who have taken large doses of any preparation of lead, too, the gums and mucous membranes within the mouth assume a blueish leaden hue—tliis color being produced by the combination of the lead, which is coming tlu'ough the mucous membrane, with the sulphur always contained in t])e mucous fluids of the mouth. What is this but a legible inscription, written by nature herself on the mucous mem-