“As soon as the patient was ready to enter his bath, the first thing which crossed his naked mind, as he stood shivering on the brink, was a disinclination to dip even his foot into a mixture which looked about as thick as a horse-pond, and about the colour of mulligatawny soup. However, having come as far as Langen Schwalbach, there was nothing to say but ‘_en avant_,’ and so, descending the steps, I got into stuff so deeply coloured with the red oxide of iron that the body, when a couple of inches below the surface, was invisible. The temperature of the water felt neither hot nor cold, but I was no sooner immersed in it than I felt that it was evidently of a strengthening, bracing nature, and I could almost have fancied myself with a set of hides in a tan-pit. The half-hour which every day I was sentenced to spend in this red decoction, was by far the longest in the twenty-four hours, and I was always very glad when my chronometer, which I regularly hung on a nail before my eyes, pointed permission to me to extricate myself from the mess. While the body was floating, hardly knowing whether to sink or swim, I found it was very difficult for the mind to enjoy any sort of recreation, or to reflect for two minutes on any one subject; and as, half shivering, I lay watching the minute-hand of my dial, it appeared the slowest traveller in existence.” In the delightful book from which the above quotation is taken, no mention is made of the disease, if any, for the relief of which the author underwent the unpleasant ordeal of the iron bath. The reader, however, will have no difficulty in surmising that the good he derived at Langen Schwalbach was due more to the change of air and scene and occupation than to the disagreeable bathing process to which he submitted daily. There is, or has been, a great deal of superstition in medicine, and the public have, or used to have, a surprising amount of faith in nasty medicines. In old dispensatories will be found the records of prescriptions into the composition of which there entered hideous and nameless abominations, and we are very much inclined to think that the lingering belief in steel baths, sulphur baths, and mud baths is but the remnant of a dying faith in nasty prescriptions, and the necessity of doing penance. CHAPTER V. A VISIT TO A BATH.