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medicine has subdued the worst symptoms; patients frequently report themselves better and in higher spirits from the use of it. One girl, who was using it for lupus, said she felt as if she could go without her dinner after it was applied; another patient compared it to a mild dose of laughing gas. Constipation often yields to it with great rapidity. Here, I believe its powers end. I know that widely different opinions are current, and indeed the power of galvanic baths has been discovered to be so miraculous as to transcend even what the proprietors of such establishments have claimed for them, or patients have believed, seeing that the bath will continue to impart the electricity to the patient long after the electricity is communicated to the bath.

One of our leading electricians told me that he had examined the batteries used at one of these establishments, 'and found that some of them had not been working for years; yet these very baths constantly effected the immediate. cure of diseases which had defied all the resources of medical art, and indeed were recommended on account of their infallible power in such cases by the most eminent members of the profession.' That many of the visitors to these places greedily swallowed and retailed such stories, needs no proof at my hands, the reader having doubtless noticed for himself, that the vacuum in the brain left by the absence of common sense is speedily filled up by a corresponding amount of faith; and that in matters of charlatanism, especially those which have reference to the health, an amount of credulity is constantly met with among even the educated classes of this

country, which would be considered abject superstition in a Hottentot. The opinion may seem a strong one, but in what other light are we to regard, and what are the proper words to use respecting the confidently expressed statements by patients, that they know the disease has been drawn out by the electricity, and that they have seen it deposited at the bottom of the bath in the shape of shreds?

In all kinds of skin disease for which vapour baths have now been recommended, cold bathing by itself is either utterly useless or highly injurious; most frequently the latter. When the disease has been fairly mastered, and the health is in progress towards steady restoration, cold bathing, particularly when it is followed by a glow of healthy reaction, often sets the patient up; but its effects must be narrowly watched, and at the first sign of a relapse it should be discontinued. Turning a strong jet of cold water upon a part where skin disease seems to be localising itself, will often act beneficially. Packing in the wet sheet seems to have answered in the hands of others, particularly for lepra; it failed in mine, though I tried it, as I thought, carefully, and at the best it is fearfully troublesome, and entails a great waste of time.

The use of the sitting bath seems to me a complete mistake in these complaints, as is that of the shower bath. To bathe in the sea, particularly on the south coast of England, means, in all stages of skin disease, except that just mentioned, to invite a severe and obstinate relapse. Warm bathing is useless in all these diseases, and often materially aggravates that which is

numerically the most important of all, eczema. The hot bath-meaning by that one of quite 98° to 100°-approaches nearest of all, in its action, to vapour, and when the patient will confine himself to a stay of two minutes in it, is a fairly safe, if only temporary, substitute. As for needle baths and all other ingenious contrivances of a like nature, I must refer the reader to the various circulars in which their virtues are enumerated.

THE END.

BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS AND ELECTROTYPERS, GUILDFORD.

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