We know not whether the public will prefer the impartial testimony of an intelligent observer like Sir Bulwer Lytton, to that of the Allopathic physician, naturally wedded to his own system and anxious to sustain it against all intruders; but we may observe, that we never yet met a physician opposed to Hydropathy, who did not, on catechising him, exhibit the most absurd ignorance respecting it. Their chronic idea is that of a person being left to shiver in wet sheets; and, as a consequence, their chronic note of warning, accompanied by an ominous shake of the head, consists in, “Don’t attempt the water cure, or it will kill you.” [17] If medical men would but see, before they assert, then much value might be attached to their opinion; but what value can be attached to their opinion about a system which they will not take the trouble of examining into? How many orthodox physicians have ever visited Blarney, or any similar Hydropathic establishment?—The proportion of such visitors (and no one can form a fair idea of the system without seeing it at work), to the whole profession would be more than represented by an infinitesimal fraction. We wonder how long the public will continue to poison [18] their systems with mercury, colchicum, iodine, and prussic acid, because a physician chooses to tell them that a mode of treatment which he has never investigated “will kill them.” It may not be uninteresting to observe, that under Hydropathic treatment, chronic disease frequently becomes acute; for, as the body improves in strength, the more acutely will any existing disease develop itself, and for the following reason: pain is caused by an effort of nature to relieve the system of some morbid influence residing in it, and the stronger the constitution, the greater efforts will it make to remove that morbid influence, and therefore the greater will be the pain; but on the other hand, when the body is enfeebled, its efforts to relieve itself, though continual, are weak and inefficient, and the disease remaining in the system, assumes the chronic and less painful form. Now with these facts before them, we have been amused at hearing physicians observe, in their efforts to decry the “Water System,” “Oh it is good for the general health, but nothing more,” a result albeit, which unfortunately the Allopathic system cannot lay claim to. When speaking thus they do not however reflect that they are affording the strongest possible testimony in support of the system which they seek to decry, inasmuch as every physiologist, from Cape Clear to the Giant’s Causeway, admits the principle, that the cure of disease is to be sought for in the powers of the living organism alone; and it must be evident that the more you strengthen that organism, the more you increase its powers to cure itself, and diminish its liability to future disease.