Note 563 — ON REGIMEN IN ACUTE DISEASES.

Galen, in his Commentary, remarks that the physicians usually did not put their patients into the baths, but made use of the douche, or affusion of hot water. He adds, that persons in good health may leave the hot bath and plunge into the cold, but that this practice is not safe in the case of invalids. He recommends, then, that there should be at hand a good supply of baths of various temperatures, so that the patient may gradually pass from one of a high to others of a low temperature. By the way, I have often wondered that Dr. Currie, who certainly had no inconsiderable pretensions to classical scholarship, should have been so profoundly ignorant as he appears to have been of the use of the warm affusion by Hippocrates and Galen in the treatment of febrile diseases. His rival, Dr. Jackson, had a much more respectable acquaintance with the ancient authorities on medicine; and I have often thought it was to be regretted that the profession at that period, in giving a trial to the affusion of cold and hot water in fever, put itself under the leadership of Currie instead of Jackson.