The whole scalp was now enveloped in ice, but so intense was the heat of the head that it was melted in a few minutes, and the clothes, steeped in the evaporating lotion, dried with extraordinary rapidity. Neither of these expedients produced the least perceptible effect. What was to be done? Recourse was had to a measure the efficacy of which is but little known and less appreciated; a remedy the power of which is second only, if, under some circumstances, it be not even superior, to that of the lancet; a remedy which can never supercede the lancet nor dispense with it, but which, when added to it, forms by the combination a treatment so powerful and efficacious that it might render death, from the acutest cerebral inflammation, as rare as recovery is at present. This remedy is known by the name of the cold dash. It consists of pouring a column of cold water upon the head in a continued stream from a height of from six to ten feet. The mode of applying it is as follows. The patient is seated in a large tub; a table is placed at the side of the tub upon which a man stands, and at as great an elevation as his arms can reach, pours upon the naked head of the patient a steady but continued stream of cold or iced water, from a watering-pot without the rose. The stream is made to fall as nearly as possible upon one and the same spot. At first the elevation must be slight, for the shock is too violent if the stream be poured at once from the highest point. There is a record, that in the East, where ingenuity so long laboured for tyranny to invent the most exquisite modes of torment, the victim was placed with his bare head under a small stream of cold water which was so directed as to fall unceasingly upon one spot. In this instance cruelty was cheated of its object by its ignorance of the mode in which its expedient operated. The device was well adapted to kill but not to produce pain, for insensibility must soon have put an end to suffering.