The uses of water in modern medicine / By Simon Baruch.

  • Baruch, Simon, 1840-1921.
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The uses of water in modern medicine / By Simon Baruch. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

    17/148 (page XI)
    PREFACE. That the proper methods of applying water in disease require to be brought before the American medical public in a comprehensive, practical form, has long been the author's observation. He has, therefore, undertaken to write a suc- cinct account of the present status of water as a therapeutic agent. The only work in the English language which has not the taint of quackery, the valuable treatise of Winternitz in Ziemssen's Handbook of Therapeutics, has long been out of print. Owing to its being a portion of a large work, it has escaped the attention of the profession, and has not received the appreciation it deserves as a scientific exposition of the views of an author who has rendered medicine the incalculable service of rescuing the remedial virtues of water from the empirical environment into which it had fallen, and to which the medical profession appeared until recently to be inclined to abandon it. As Ziemssen has justly said, whatever we know of hydrotherapy, we owe to Winternitz. To Prof. Winternitz I am personally indebted, not only for knowledge derived from his numerous scientific and clinical writings, each one of which is replete with logically stated truths, but also for personal guidance and instruction during a sojourn at his institution in Kaltenleutgeben, where the best informed hydrotherapeutistsin Europe have received their instruction. In this monograph it is not proposed to furnish an ex- position of hydropathy or the water-cure system, that method of treatment whose enthusiastic followers claim that it will inaugurate the millennium of therapeutics, because its efficacy is not less marvelous than its methods are simple and easily comprehended. It is the author's purpose to