Excerpt from Hydrotherapy: A Work on Hydrotherapy in General, Its Application to Special Affections, the Technic or Processes Employed, and the Use of Waters Internally
No modern text-book on a medical subject can appear as the complete product of a single mind. In the evolution of a medical work, especially one on hydrotherapy, we have an art and a science whose beginnings stretch back for two thousand years. The genealogy of such a work reaches through ages of empiricism to the great minds which gave medicine its earlier start - to Hippocrates, Galen, Celsus, Arets?us, Musa, Paulus ?gineta, and Oribasius. The Roman baths were one of the great features of that great empire, and were established in its most distant possessions. Only last year, A. D. 1909, in the ancient town of Bath, in England, there was a restoration of the Roman bath as it existed in the time of the C?sars. The baths of Rome became so sumptuous, and entailed such extravagance, that they eventually lost their hygienic features, and contributed to the decay of the Roman character and bodily vigor, so that in the dark ages that followed the nobler uses of water were neglected. Only within the last two hundred years has light begin to reappear, and only within the last fifty years has a scientific system of hydrotherapy been evolved.
As the science exists to-day, supplemented by the use of modern apparatus, it is a powerful aid in therapeutics, rapidly growing in popularity as the knowledge of its technic becomes more widely diffused. It would be an almost hopeless task to give each writer credit for the introduction or description of particular hydrotherapeutic methods. References have been made in places throughout this work so that further studies may be made. For a bibliography one is referred to the first and second series of the Index Catalogue of the Surgeon-General"s Library at Washington.
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