Hippocrates, the father of medicine, who added friction to cold bathing, was accustomed to use cold water in his treatment of the most serious illnesses. It was Hippocrates who first observed that warm water chilled, whilst cold water warmed.
The Macedonians considered warm water to be enervating; and their women, after accouchement, were washed with cold water.
Virgil called the ancient inhabitants of Italy, a race of men hard and austere, who immersed their newly-born children in the rivers, and accustomed them to cold water.
Pliny, in speaking of A. Musa, who cured Horace by means of cold water, said that he put an end to confused drugs; and he also alludes to a certain Charmes, who made a sensation at Rome by the cures he effected with cold water. On being asked what he thought drugs were sent for, he said, “he could not imagine, except that men might destroy themselves with them when they were tired of living.”
Celsus, called the Cicero of doctors, employed water for complaints of the head and stomach.
Galen, in the second century, recommended cold bathing to the healthy, as well as to patients labouring under the attacks of fever.
Charlemagne, aware of the salubrity of cold bathing, encouraged the use of it throughout his empire, and introduced swimming as an amusement at his court.
Michael Savonarola, an Italian doctor, in 1462, recommended cold water in gout, ophthalmia, and hæmorrhages.
Cardanus, of Pavia, 1575, complains that the doctors in his time made so little use of cold water in the curing of gout.
Van der Heyden, a doctor at Ghent, in a work published in 1624, states that during an epidemic dysentery, he cured many hundreds of persons with cold water, and that during a long practice of fifty years, the best cures he ever made were effected with cold water.