3d. With the exception of a few specific remedies, such as mercury, sulphur, colchicum, and ergot, with the real nature of whose physiological operation on the human frame little is known, almost all the other medicinal agents act through the medium of the digestive organs, the liver, the kidneys, and the skin. Now, the mineral waters of such spas as Wisbaden, Kissengen, Marienbad, Carlsbad, &c. act through these organs also, and contain the elements of many of our most efficient remedies. They have, besides, great advantages over ordinary medicines at home, in consequence of the exercise of travelling, the change of air, and the alteration of habits that precede the course of the waters.
4. Through what channels do the noxious physical agents enter the constitution and produce disease? Through the digestive organs and skin, without doubt,—to which may be added the lungs, which may imbibe the principles of disorder with the oxygen from the air we breathe.
5. But there is a great class of moral causes of diseases, acting on the body through the medium of the mind—a class so extensive that Plato considered it to be the origin of all corporeal maladies!
6. Against these moral agents the great spas possess powerful auxiliary counter-agents, as preventives, in the form of amusements on the spot and abstraction from cares. They also present the means of removing (if removeable) the effects which these moral causes have already inflicted on the bodily frame.
7. The far greater number of physical remedies act by altering and improving disordered functions and secretions—by evacuation—and by imparting tone to debilitated organs or the whole constitution.
8. It must be allowed that mineral waters contain, to a very considerable extent, the requisite ingredients for fulfilling one or all of the foregoing indications.
9. It is often found to be beneficial to combine tonics, alteratives, and aperients in the same formula or prescription, in order that the three indications alluded to, may be simultaneously accomplished.[77] It is undeniable that some of the spas contain within themselves this combination of chalybeates, aperients, and alteratives, either of which ingredients can be increased at pleasure on the spot.
10. The medicinal agents in the mineral waters, though in much smaller quantities than when given in prescriptions, have a much better chance of success, in consequence of their being so largely diluted by the hand of Nature, and the temperature of the diluent being so very high, in most of the springs.
11. The early hours, and the exercise taken while drinking mineral waters, have powerful influence in promoting their salutary operation. How many invalids, in England, would start from their beds at five o’clock in the morning, to drink salt and water till seven or eight o’clock, using their limbs all the time in locomotion? very few!