Every Man His Own Doctor / The Cold Water, Tepid Water, and Friction-Cure, as Applicable to Every Disease to Which the Human Frame Is Subject, and Also to the Cure of Disease in Horses and Cattle

by R. T. Claridge

Are the effects, as described by hydropathists and by the British and Foreign Medical Review, produced without purging, vomiting, drugging, or the lancet—or by what other means are such essential results to be attained? We answer, by hydropathy alone are they to be produced, through the medium of the external and internal skin or mucous membrane, the most important organ in the human structure, and the most neglected by the guardians of the public health; and by the promotion of all the secretions and excretions.

The Abbé Sanctorius, a Florentine, might be said to have spent twenty years of his life in a balance determining the amount of matters thrown off by the pores of the skin. To ascertain this, he first cleaned and then placed small glasses, some not longer than thimbles, on various parts of the human frame, when the result proved that every man ought to pass off from his person, daily, from six to seven pounds. Two and a half pounds are supposed to be released by the ordinary modes of evacuation, and the remainder by the pores of the skin. Now, if this exhalation is impeded, and the necessary amount not eliminated (which must happen if the skin has lost that energy, which exercise of the body and cold ablutions can alone support), what becomes of the superfluous juices thus retained in the system? The answer is easy; they circulate through the internal organs and become the source of fevers, inflammations, dropsy, and all sorts of diseases. Medical men see these effects, but do not suppose them to have resulted from suppressed perspiration. Instead of attacking the skin, they assault the stomach and bowels, weaken the digestive organs, and by that means create disease; whilst water, on the contrary, is a remedy, possessing at once dissolving and strengthening properties, which would seem to neutralise each other, but that we have daily evidence to the contrary.

Herein lies the great secret of hydropathy: by its modes of application, morbid humours are drawn to the surface and eliminated, the body is cooled, and the skin put into a state to perform its indispensable duty. In internal inflammations, the morbid heat from the internal skin or mucous membrane is drawn off by the application of cold and irritation to the surface, and the disease subdued without charging the stomach with anything but pure spring water, which in contradistinction to drugs, produces the most salubrious effects.

The following extract shows that the skin is the great drain through which matters injurious to the system, and superfluous heat are drawn off and accounts for hydropathy being so universal a remedy.

A Practical Treatise on Healthy Skin, by Erasmus Wilson, 1 Vol. 1845.—Extract.

“The structure of the skin and the diseases to which it is liable, have latterly received from many of the medical profession considerable attention. The skin is that soft and pliant membrane which invests the whole of the external surface of the body, as also the interior which is called mucous membrane.

“The construction of these two membranes may easily inform us, without having recourse to fanciful hypotheses, how disease, affecting any part of this membrane, either internally or externally, may pass to any other part and affect the whole; and thus how a faulty digestion in a lady, a disease of the investing or mucous membrane of the stomach, may show itself in eruptions on the face. We see at once, too, how it happens that, calling into more active action the shower bath and flesh brush, dyspepsia may be avoided or cured. It serves also to explain the circumstance noticed by Fourcroy and Vauquelin, that the skin, with all its products, ‘is capable of supplying the office of the kidneys,’ and carrying off, as we know it to imbibe nourishment, the indispensable excretions for which the proper organs may be deficient.

“In explanation of this circumstance, we must remark, that the skin, internal or external, in which terminate all the arteries and commence the veins, in which too, the nerves of sensation commence, and the nerves of volition terminate, not only envelopes the whole body internally and externally, but is also the secretory organ of every part, and the immediate means of communication with the external world.

“The skin is the organ of contact with the external world, and the means of making us acquainted with every part of the universe. The senses of touch, of hearing, of smell, of taste, are all exercised by the skin.

“By the vessels terminating in the skin, or of which it is formed, all the phenomena of nutrition, and decay of appetite, and sensation, health and disease are produced.