There are numerous other ways in which water is essential to the process of life within us. The free drinking of water greatly favors the elimination from the system of the products of waste. It hastens tissue change, and encourages the assimilation of food. And apart from its use internally, it has also a very great value as a means of applying heat to or abstracting it from the body for remedial purposes, to say nothing of the functions it performs as a cleansing agent. Of late years the value of water in therapeutics has become generally recognized by the medical profession, and all over the world its use as an active agent has increased. Indeed, in the view of some physiologists, ordinary pure cold water is by far the most powerful and useful of all known healing agencies. It heals not by any strange or occult power, but by co-operating with the natural forces of the body, by aiding to the utmost those physiological processes by means of which the body sustains itself in health, and resists the encroachments of disease by the means of its bodyguard of blood cells, and by maintaining at its high pitch its innate vital resistance. When the Austrian Priessnitz first began the use of water in his mountain village a century ago, the world believed that the wonderful cures he wrought were accomplished by mystical charms or incantations by which he was supposed to communicate to the water its healing power. Modern science, however, has revealed the secret of water’s potency as a curative agent, and hydrotherapy, or curing by water, is now as well recognized as almost any other branch of medical science. THE VALUE OF BATHING The daily cold bath is one of the best ways of keeping the doctor at a distance. Cold water has the property of increasing vital work of all kinds. When it is applied to the skin “impulses are sent inward that awaken every organ of the body,” says Kellogg. Let us see what takes place: when a person dips his body into cold water, as in sea bathing, or when he steps into the bath at home, the first thing he does, which in fact he finds himself doing involuntarily, is to draw in a deep breath. “Oooh-h-h!” he says, but he says it with an indrawing breath. The lungs swell out, the heart begins to pound away with unusually increased vigor and strength, and every part of the system is stimulated. Cold bathing and deep breathing are two valuable things which go inseparably together. The deep breathing increases lung activity, and the lungs bring in more oxygen; the heart circulates the blood with greater force, and hence more and better blood is carried to every tissue of the body. The result is a stirring up of the bodily forces, and a distribution throughout the system of a larger amount of highly vitalized and oxygenated blood.