if such an occupation were not the delight of the whole rural population? Take the town. Does there ever come down a torrent of rain, making the streets the channels of mighty rivers, that there is not seen instantly a colony of young Argonauts emerging, like flies from the Tweed, out of the very water, and exploring the unknown profundities of the gutter, as from lamp-post to lamp-post they go, “sounding on their dim and perilous way?” Take every well-regulated family on Saturday night. Where is the fortunate urchin who shall escape the rude purgation of the Girzy, nor be sent to bed red as a lobster, and clean as a whistle? Take the far-reaching seabeach from Newhaven to Joppa. Are those tremendous scenes which have lately riveted the gaze of a whole country on the sands of Portobello characteristic of a people animated by a feline antipathy to moisture? The verdict is so unquestionably for us, that we decline to adduce any further evidence.
In short, Europe continued to maintain most amicable relations, while Asia cultivated the closest intimacy with water, hot and cold, fresh and salt. America is too young yet to be included in the argument; and as for Africa, crocodiles, hippopotami, and sharks, usurp a monopoly of the favourite pools so exclusively, that the returns of its bathing statistics are most uncertain. In this course, matters ran on smoothly for cycles and cycles of years, races of men following races, as waves follow waves. Any perceptible alteration in the relative positions of man and water, at the same time, was in the direction of stricter and more frequent communication between them. Cleanliness became fashionable—an event which, without snapping the connexion somewhat loosely subsisting between the purifying element and the inferior grades of society, rapidly and widely diffused a knowledge of its capabilities and its amiabilities among the higher circles. Well, on the dawn of a glorious morning, when the sun, and all the seas, lakes, and rivers of the globe were playing at battledore and shuttle-cock with the beams of the orb of day, water suddenly found itself, at a bound, lifted to a pinnacle only a little beneath the summit on which Thales of yore enthroned it. Matter, on this occasion, it was not announced to be—but the cure of all the afflictions with which matter could be visited. Ten thousand aromatic herbs gracefully adjusted their petals, ere they fell, and withered into rank and noisome weeds; ten thousand apothecaries were petrified in the act of braying poison in their mortars, and in that attitude remain, stony remembrances of their own villanies; physicians melted away by faculties and colleges;
“Nations ransom’d and the world o’er-joyed”
walked once more emancipated, as Milton sings,
“From colocynthine pains and senna tea.”
Numerous are the blunders under which humanity has reposed in incurious apathy. The sun gamboled round the earth so long, that, when they changed places and motions, the denizens at that moment of our planet were cheated out of several days in their sublunary or circumsolar career. What was that mistake in comparison with the disastrous error of having for centuries obdurately turned their backs on the inexhaustible laboratory in which alone health could be bought, and perversely purchased destruction from a series of quacks, whose infinite retails had caused more wholsale ruin than the pernicious wrath of Pelides? “Look here upon this picture and on this.” Declining to accede to the unpleasant request we hurry to another phenomenon. The inestimable discovery of the Water-Cure has proved the posthumous triumph of Old Hygrostroma. Instead of being a damper to good-fellowship, the wet-blanket is synonimous with, and symbolical, and productive of all that is vivacious, hilarious, obstreperous, and jolly. A dozen of champagne is not an equivalent for the “Sheet;” and when you are once properly “packed,” by the mere flow of your animal spirits, and a tumbler of pure spring water, you shall “sew up” the most potential toper and wit, whose facetiousness grows with the consumption of his wine.
Here we perceive that our readers, by an unmistakeable twitch of the muscles of the face, intimate their suspicions that our fidelity to the water system is impeachable. An explanatory sentence is unavoidable. In the month of August, we are always like Napoleon at Elba, confident of the incorruptible attachment of our adherents, but at a considerable distance from every one of them—certain of re-assuming, in undiminished splendour, and amidst thunders of acclamation, our undisputed sway on the first of September, but much at a loss a week before our return to find a bark, however frail, in which to trust our fortunes—projecting stupendous expeditions with invincible armies, and, in the meanwhile, possessing not even a recruit from the awkward squad to put through his facings. The days were insufferably hot or unmitigably rainy. Nobody cared about news, nor did anybody send us grouse. The Benledi steamboat was stranded with a broken back on a rock of the Fifeshire coast; and harrowing paragraphs represented all the railways in every direction as strewed with the “disjecta membra” of ill-fated travellers. The thunder and lightning deafened and blinded us, while the absence of all companionship reduced us to compulsory dumbness. In this torpor of the soul and confusion of the intellect, looking up with a vacant stare to the cupola, on which the firmament was playing with inimitable rapidity a fierce prelude, we were startled by the appearance of Mr Lane’s elegant and agreeable volume. It found us in no very consecutive or severely logical mood. The engravings were amusing—the writing was pleasant. Having skimmed the contents with our customary velocity, we flung ourselves back upon the downy slopes of our autumn ottoman, and poured forth the rhapsody which has bewildered our friends. It could not well be otherwise. There was such implicit faith in Mr Lane—in union with so much good feeling and good sense—pleading his case so fervently—interesting us so much in himself, his illness and his recovery, his relapses and his mendings, his packing and scrubbing, his company and his talk, his walks and his rides, his digestions and reflections, and leaving us in the end so little convinced of the unquestionable superiority of the treatment which had bettered him, and no doubt many others, that, assured of there being nothing new under the sun, we took our flight back into the olden times to recall, if we could, when water ever aspired so loftily before in popular estimation. Icarus-like, we dropped into the bosom of the Ægean, and were dragged up opportunely by the phantom of Thales at Miletus.
Captivating, we admit, is the notion that water cures all diseases. There is a grandeur in the simplicity, and a rapture in the tastelessness of such a medicine, which its motley competitors cannot approach. Did any one ever see physic, which, by its appearance, infused love for it at first sight, and a vehement longing to swallow it? Revolve how endless in variety of colour and substance are the contents of a medicine-chest, and confess that you have not been able to look at one of them with satisfaction. The mature mind recoils from terrible reminiscences; and at the apparition of some single phial, a hideous congregation of detestable tastes, starting from the crevices of memory, will rush into the palate, and resuscitate the forgotten tortures and trials of infancy and boyhood. To be spared all this were “a consummation devoutly to be wished.” To know that no shock sharper than the douche, and no draught more nauseous than half-a-dozen tumblers of water, should ever, at the doctors hand, visit or wrack the frame might subdue the refractory temper of patients. To throw physic to the dogs, and be cleansed of all perilous stuff by a currycomb and a pail, might reconcile us to be assimilated to the horse. But alas! what do we discern in man, “the paragon of animals,” which will entitle us to conclude that his innumerable bodily frailties can be so overcome or expelled?
“Oh, mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities.”
Happy and painful experiences unite to prove it. It has cost the labour and the zeal, the intense concentration of the undivided energies, and, in memorable instances, the very lives of the erudite and the ingenious, the sagacious and the daring, engaged in an incalculable multiplicity of investigations, experiments, and observations, in all ages and in all countries, to explore, and test, and confirm what is valuable, trustworthy, and stable, in medical science. Even to-day it may be urged that much is still obscure, indefinite, unsteady, and liable to be overturned and dismissed by the clearer illumination of to-morrow. Be it so. But, in spite of all the lengths to which the objection can be pushed, there remain two points irrefragably settled in medicine. First of all, there are certain remedies ascertained, beyond the shadow of a doubt, to act efficaciously on certain diseases. In the second place—and by far the most important truth for us in this discussion—no one specific remedy has ever been discovered which applies efficaciously to all diseases, nor to the overwhelming majority, nay, nor to any majority of all diseases. A period of ten years never elapses without such a panacea being broached, paraded, and extinguished. The “impar congressus Achillei” is made manifest in every case. At the outset, accordingly, an advertisement of the Cold Water-Cure as a specific brands it with a suspicion which has never been false before. To affirm that, from Galen to Abernethy, a veil of impenetrable ignorance shrouded the vision of all physicians, which prevented them from picking up the truth lying at their feet, is not to be more arrogant than Holloway’s ointment, or Morrison’s pills. It is, however, to offer a statement for our acceptation which common sense and the practical testimony of more than two thousand years simultaneously reject. The question truly deserves no argument. The publication of the discovery of a panacea is sufficient. The remedy, whatever it is, cannot be what it pretends to be; although it may be worse or better than it is generally supposed to be. Those who have been restored to convalescence, to buoyancy of spirits, and agility of limbs, by cold water, are at perfect liberty to abjure and denounce all other cures. But the chasm in the reasoning is a yawning one, over which an adventurous leap must be taken, to stand firm on the other side upon the conclusion that what cured Richard of dyspepsia will deliver Thomas from typhus.