All these different methods and remedies, and many others, have been and are still used with more or less effect. But where there are three physicians to recommend one of them, there will always be four to contradict them. They may all do some good in certain epidemics or individual cases; they may relieve symptoms; they may save the life of many a patient who would have died without them (although many a patient who died, might have lived also, had he been under a more judicious treatment, or--under no treatment at all.) But none is reliable in general; none contains a specific to neutralize the morbid poison; none is a reliable prophylactic, such as vaccina for small-pox; and if single physicians, or whole classes of physicians, assert to the contrary, the fault must lie somewhere, either in their excess of faith in certain authorities, which induces them to throw their own pia desideria into the scales, or in a want of cool, impartial observation continued for a sufficient length of time to wear out sanguine expectations. _The fact is that there neither exists a reliable prophylactic, nor has a safe specific been found as yet; that all is guess-and-piece work; and that people are taken by scarlet-fever and die of it about the same as before those vaunted methods and remedies were discovered._ I wish to impress my readers with this fact--the proofs of which they can easily find in the mortality lists of the papers--to make them understand that by giving up for the hydriatic method any of the modes and remedies, which have been in use hitherto, they do not run a risk of losing anything. 43. WATER-TREATMENT, AS USED BY CURRIE, REUSS, HESSE, SCHOENLEIN, &C. Beside the above modes of treatment _cold_ and _tepid Water_ has been extensively used and recommended by reliable authorities. Currie,[25] Pierce, Gregory, Bateman, von Wedekind, Kolbany,[26] Torrence, Reuss,[27] von Froehlichsthal,[28] and others, have treated their scarlet-patients with _cold affusions_. Henke, Raimann, Froehlich, Hesse,[29] Steimmig,[30] Gregory, Jr., Schoenlein, Fuchs, and others, have not ventured beyond _cool_ and _tepid ablutions_. The former, although the general result has been very satisfactory, have proved dangerous in some cases; and the latter, though safer in general, have not been efficient in many others. The use of water, though safer than other remedies, has never become general, _owing to the unsystematic, unsafe, or inefficient forms of its application_.