r own pia desideria into
the scales, or in a want of cool, impartial observation continued for a
sufficient length of time to wear out sanguine expectations. _The fact
is that there neither exists a reliable prophylactic, nor has a safe
specific been found as yet; that all is guess-and-piece work; and that
people are taken by scarlet-fever and die of it about the same as before
those vaunted methods and remedies were discovered._ I wish to impress
my readers with this fact--the proofs of which they can easily find in
the mortality lists of the papers--to make them understand that by
giving up for the hydriatic method any of the modes and remedies, which
have been in use hitherto, they do not run a risk of losing anything.

43. WATER-TREATMENT, AS USED BY CURRIE, REUSS, HESSE, SCHOENLEIN, &C.

Beside the above modes of treatment _cold_ and _tepid Water_ has been
extensively used and recommended by reliable authorities. Currie,[25]
Pierce, Gregory, Bateman, von Wedekind, Kolbany,[26] Torrence,
Reuss,[27] von Froehlichsthal,[28] and others, have treated their
scarlet-patients with _cold affusions_. Henke, Raimann, Froehlich,
Hesse,[29] Steimmig,[30] Gregory, Jr., Schoenlein, Fuchs, and others,
have not ventured beyond _cool_ and _tepid ablutions_. The former,
although the general result has been very satisfactory, have proved
dangerous in some cases; and the latter, though safer in general, have
not been efficient in many others. The use of water, though safer than
other remedies, has never become general, _owing to the unsystematic,
unsafe, or inefficient forms of its application_.

Fear and prejudice--fed by the great mass of physicians, who generally
take too much care of their reputation to expose it in the use of a
remedy the effects of which are so easily understood by every one--have
also been obstacles to its promulgation; and the exaggerations of some
of its advocates in modern times, bearing for a great part the
characteristics of charlatanism, have scared many who might have become
converts to Priessnitz's method, to whose genius and good luck we are
indebted for the most important, most harmless, and at the same time the
most efficient and most reliable discovery, viz.:

44. PRIESSNITZ'S METHOD--THE WET-SHEET-PACK,

a remedy which, alone, is worth the whole antiphlogistic, diaphoretic,
and, indeed, the whole curative apparatus of the profession, in ancient
and modern times, for any kind of fevers, and e