All these different methods and remedies, and many others, have been and are still used with more or less effect. But where there are three physicians to recommend one of them, there will always be four to contradict them. They may all do some good in certain epidemics or individual cases; they may relieve symptoms; they may save the life of many a patient who would have died without them (although many a patient who died, might have lived also, had he been under a more judicious treatment, or—under no treatment at all.) But none is reliable in general; none contains a specific to neutralize the morbid poison; none is a reliable prophylactic, such as vaccina for small-pox; and if single physicians, or whole classes of physicians, assert to the contrary, the fault must lie somewhere, either in their excess of faith in certain authorities, which induces them to throw their own pia desideria into the scales, or in a want of cool, impartial observation continued for a sufficient length of time to wear out sanguine expectations. The fact is that there neither exists a reliable prophylactic, nor has a safe specific been found as yet; that all is guess-and-piece work; and that people are taken by scarlet-fever and die of it about the same as before those vaunted methods and remedies were discovered. I wish to impress my readers with this fact—the proofs of which they can easily find in the mortality lists of the papers—to make them understand that by giving up for the hydriatic method any of the modes and remedies, which have been in use hitherto, they do not run a risk of losing anything.
43. WATER-TREATMENT, AS USED BY CURRIE, REUSS, HESSE, SCHŒNLEIN, &C.
Beside the above modes of treatment cold and tepid Water has been extensively used and recommended by reliable authorities. Currie,[25] Pierce, Gregory, Bateman, von Wedekind, Kolbany,[26] Torrence, Reuss,[27] von Fröhlichsthal,[28] and others, have treated their scarlet-patients with cold affusions. Henke, Raimann, Fröhlich, Hesse,[29] Steimmig,[30] Gregory, Jr., Schœnlein, Fuchs, and others, have not ventured beyond cool and tepid ablutions. The former, although the general result has been very satisfactory, have proved dangerous in some cases; and the latter, though safer in general, have not been efficient in many others. The use of water, though safer than other remedies, has never become general, owing to the unsystematic, unsafe, or inefficient forms of its application.
Fear and prejudice—fed by the great mass of physicians, who generally take too much care of their reputation to expose it in the use of a remedy the effects of which are so easily understood by every one—have also been obstacles to its promulgation; and the exaggerations of some of its advocates in modern times, bearing for a great part the characteristics of charlatanism, have scared many who might have become converts to Priessnitz's method, to whose genius and good luck we are indebted for the most important, most harmless, and at the same time the most efficient and most reliable discovery, viz.:
44. PRIESSNITZ'S METHOD—THE WET-SHEET-PACK,
a remedy which, alone, is worth the whole antiphlogistic, diaphoretic, and, indeed, the whole curative apparatus of the profession, in ancient and modern times, for any kind of fevers, and especially for eruptive diseases. Nor did the physicians before Priessnitz know anything about the use of the sitz-bath for affections of the brain in torpid reaction, which in such cases, is the only anchor of safety. In short, water-treatment was, like other methods, an excellent thing for certain symptoms, but not generally and safely applicable in every case.
To appreciate the effects of the wet-sheet pack, one must have seen it used for inflammatory fever, when it acts like a charm, frequently removing all the feverish symptoms, and their cause, in a few hours.