CHOICE OF COAST.
Earth is her own doctor; every climate has its own remedy. More and more will Medicine lie in Emigration. But it must be an Emigration of foresight, not one of those mad-cap, rapid, and most mischievous journeys in which the patient rushes from one extreme of climate to another, but prudently calculated to the obtaining of those vivifying aids which nature every where holds in store for those who know how to profit by them. The youth, that is yet to be born, depends upon these two things—the Science of Emigration and the Art of Acclimatization. Hitherto, man has remained a prisoner like an oyster on its rock. If he occasionally emigrates to some small distance from his temperate zone, he, for the most part, goes to die. He will only become free, really brave, when the science and art of Emigration and Climatization shall make him free of the whole globe.
Few diseases are cured in the place and under the circumstances which have given rise to them; they hold to certain habits which the localities perpetuate and render unconquerable. There is no Reform, physical or moral, for those who persist in the originating vice.
Medicine, guided by the auxiliary sciences, directs us in the new road to the desired end. Our emigrations must be made prudently and gradually. Can we, safely, without preparation, without alteration of diet and of habits, be suddenly removed from an inland to a maritime abode? Can we prudently take to the sea-bath until the sea breeze shall have trained our physical frame? Can we suddenly and without preparation encounter the severe shock, the horripilation of the really tremendous shock of the cold water bath in the cold open air? These questions we are glad to say are more and more being put and answered by our physicians.
The extreme rapidity of our railroad journeys is very mischievous even to the strong;—in many cases fatal to the ailing. To pass, as so many do, from Paris to the Mediterranean in twenty-four hours, passing at every hour into a different climate, is as perilous a thing as a nervous person can do. You arrive agitated, giddy. When Madame de Sevigné took a whole month to travel from Brittany to Provence, she proceeded by slow and calculated degrees from one climate to another, and its opposite. She proceeded, by slow degrees, from the maritime climate of the West into the inland climate of Burgundy. Then, travelling slowly by the upper Rhone into Dauphiny, she, with the greater safety and comfort, braved the free winds of Valence and of Avignon; then, halting awhile, and resting at Aix, in the interior of Provence, far from the Rhone and from its shores, she made herself Provençal in lungs.
France has the enviable advantage of being between two seas, and thence the facility of alternating, as the disease may require, between the saline tonicity of the Mediterranean and the moister and—except in case of tempest—the far milder air of the Ocean.
On each of the two coasts there is a graduated scale of stations, more or less mild, more or less strengthening. It is very interesting to observe, and very useful to follow, this double scale,—proceeding, as a general thing, from weaker to stronger.
The climate of the Ocean parting from the strong, rough, ever-heaving waters of the channel, becomes extremely mild at the South of Brittany, milder still in the Gironde, and mildest of all in the land-locked basin of Arcachon.