If the constitution be not yet entirely broke, weakness oppresses the stomach and the nerves, the learned are troubled with hysteric symptoms, often attended with a vertigo, fainting fits, suffocation, and anxiety. They are to be cured like women who are troubled with hysterics, occasioned by mobility and want of tone in the fibres; they are to be cured, I say, by bitters, ferulacious gums, myrrh, steel, and the cold bath. The frequent use of the latter preserves a good state of health, and repairs a broken constitution; for it is efficacious above all other remedies, except there be already an extraordinary degree of weakness, in strengthening the stomach, the nerves, and the whole body; it restores sleep, produces a chearfulness and serenity of mind, and supplies new strength to pursue new studies. This made the ancients set so high a value upon it, that, even amidst the avocations of their necessary business, they never failed to bathe every day: and I most earnestly recommend to the literati the frequent use of bathing. I am not ignorant that the ancients often used the warm bath, but they used it as a remedy after exercise or fatigue; and it generally agrees very well with the robust and active; but they restored their strength with cold baths. AUGUSTUS, who received no benefit from the warm bath, when affected with great weakness of body, was advised to have recourse to the cold bath by ANTONIUS MUSA. Cold baths are salutary to delicate constitutions, and the health of the learned is generally, though not always, as much hurt by bathing in warm water, as promoted by bathing in cold. Friction in a great measure produces the same effects with bathing; for if the whole lower belly of a person, whilst he lies supine in bed in the morning, with bent knees and an empty stomach, be rubbed all over with a rough cloth, he will be greatly benefited by it: by this artifice the motion in the abdomen is increased, the stagnant juices are thrown out, the secretions are increased, the excrements are prevented from staying too long in the body, and innumerable diseases are cured, which, as you have been frequently told, are caused by a slow circulation. If the skin is rubbed all over, either with a cloth or a flesh-brush, the cuticular secretion is greatly promoted, the circulation of the blood is so quickened, that a violent fever may be caused by rubbing alone, the motion is increased in the smallest vessels, the strength is repaired, and the ills caused by want of exercise are partly remedied. The ancients were therefore right in setting a great value upon friction: it was afterwards unhappily neglected; but the English physicians revived it with great success; and there is no class of men to whom it may be of greater service than to the studious. I would, however, recommend to them not to use this kind of exercise till they have read what CELSUS and GALEN have written concerning it.