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EDITORIAL.
THE PREVENTION AND CURE OF MANY CHRONIC DISEASES BY MOVEMENTS.
Open quackery was at one time contented with the market-place and the stage; its merits and achievements were announced only by the lungs of its professors and their assistants. We have changed all that. Quackery has improved with the age. It has got possession of the newspapers, and forces its way in the pulpit; it has its colleges and graduates, it edits journals and writes books; but it has changed its form, not its spirit; at bottom it is as shameless, and lying and rediculous as ever. While its essence is eternal its form is constantly changing. A variety springs up, flourishes, attains its maturity, then dies away, to be replaced by another, or to be revived in a distant country or a future generation. The facilities of intercommunication afforded by railroad and steam vessels yield the same advantage to imposture and credulity, that they give to science and truth. We import nonsense and humbug as well as silks and dry goods. But as was observed on another occasion, home manufacture has sprung up, and we have become exporters as well as importers. Spiritual knocking are set off against Mesmerism; Thompsonianism is sent in exchange for Hygeia; native Sarsaparillas have driven the foreign from the market; Mormonism goes a long way to balance Homeopathy, while the “Great Harmonican,” in size, in pretension and in absurdity, is scarcely to be rivalled any where in the present age.
The newest delusion that pretends to be a system, Kinesipathy, is, in the country of its origin, already several years old. It comes to us from Sweden, and recommends the treatment of diseases by means of various exercises, and above all, blows on different parts of the body. All these are set forth with the greatest gravity, and defined and commented on with as much precision as if the author was bringing forward a National Pharmacopœia. In the treatment of disease the motives, positions, and blows, are varied in the strangest, and often most ludicrous manner. Witness the following prescription for gonorrhea, which is complete except as the author states “some movements depending on particular circumstances.”
1. “Percussion on the sacrum in the stride standing position.
2. “Transversal chopping on the neck in the sitting position.
3. “Pressure above the os pubis in the lying position, with elevated back, while the separated and bent legs are drawn towards the abdomen. Vibration of the perineum, in the same position.”