5. The warm bath in winter, and the temperate, or cold bath in summer.
6. Exercise. This may be in a carriage, or on horseback. The viscera being debilitated in this state of predisposition to the gout, are strengthened in a peculiar manner by the gentle motion of a horse. Where this or other modes of passive exercise cannot be had, frictions to the limbs and body should be used every day.
7. Costiveness should be avoided by taking occasionally one or two table spoons full of Dr. Warner's purging tincture prepared by infusing rhubarb, orange peel, and caraway seeds, of each an ounce, for three days in a quart of Madeira, or any other white wine. If this medicine be ineffectual for opening the bowels, rhubarb may be taken in the manner formerly mentioned.
8. The understanding and passions should be constantly employed in agreeable studies and pursuits. Fatigue of mind and body should be carefully avoided.
9. A warm climate often protracts life in persons subject to this state of gout. The citizens of Rome who had worn down their constitutions by intemperance, added many years to their lives, by migrating to Naples, and enjoying there, in a warmer sun, the pure air of the Mediterranean, and sir William Temple says the Portuguese obtain the same benefit by transporting themselves to the Brazils, after medicine and diet cease to impart vigour to their constitutions in their native country.
Thus have I enumerated the principal remedies for curing and preventing the gout. Most of them are to be met with in books of medicine, but they have been administered by physicians, or taken by patients with so little regard to the different states of the system, that they have in many instances done more harm than good. Solomon places all wisdom, in the management of human affairs, in finding out the proper times for performing certain actions. Skill in medicine, consists in an eminent degree in timing remedies. There is a time to bleed, and a time to withhold the lancet. There is a time to give physic, and a time to trust to the operations of nature. There is a time to eat meat, and there is a time to abstain from it. There is a time to give tonic medicines, and a time to refrain from them. In a word, the cure of the gout depends wholly upon two things, viz. proper remedies, in their proper times, and places.
I shall take leave of this disease, by comparing it to a deep and dreary cave in a new country, in which ferocious beasts and venomous reptiles, with numerous ghosts and hobgoblins, are said to reside. The neighbours point at the entrance of this cave with horror, and tell of the many ravages that have been committed upon their domestic animals, by the cruel tenants which inhabit it. At length a school-boy, careless of his safety, ventures to enter this subterraneous cavern, when! to his great delight, he finds nothing in it but the same kind of stones and water he left behind him upon the surface of the earth. In like manner, I have found no other principles necessary to explain the cause of the gout, and no other remedies necessary to cure it, than such as are admitted in explaining the causes, and in prescribing for the most simple and common diseases.
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