on different people and in different conditions of the system. To some
persons it is less debilitating than the use of hot water, and others,
myself among the number, find it so excessively disagreeable from the
apoplectic sensation it produces in their heads, and the difficulty of
breathing which they suffer from it, that nothing but a discovery that
it was the only means in their particular case of relieving sufferings
like those of opium would induce them to enter it. Many persons
profess to like it as well as the Russian (which, singularly enough,
in no case have I ever known to produce the disagreeable feeling in
head or lungs), and it certainly ranks with the foremost alleviatives
of the opium suffering--the agonizing rythmical neuralgia of which I
have spoken usually becoming magically lulled within two minutes from
the time of entering the first heated chamber, and ceasing altogether
as soon as the perspiration becomes thoroughly established. At Lord's
Island our Turkish bath-room will immediately adjoin our Russian, and
the temperature being supported by pipes from the same boiler which
furnishes vapor to the other, will be no heavy addition to our expense
in the way of apparatus. I don't know whether it is necessary to tell
any body that the Turkish bath is merely an exposure of the naked body
(with a wet turban around the head) to a dry heat varying from 110º
F. to a temperature hot enough, to cook an egg hard--followed by
ablutions and shampooings somewhat similar to those of the Russian
bath.
As it is our aim to _cure_ the opium-eater by bringing to bear
upon his most complicated of all difficulties every means which has
proved effectual in the treatment of any one of its particulars,
however caused in other instances, we ask no questions of any
appliance regarding its nativity, but take from the empiric whatever
he has stumbled on of value as freely as the worthiest discoveries of
the philosopher from him. There have been various attempts to erect
into a _pathy_ every one of the applications we have already
mentioned, and I shall close this brief outline of our therapeutic
apparatus at Lord's Island with one more valuable method of relief and
cure whose enthusiastic discoverers (or rather adapters) have outraged
etymology worse than the regular practice by trying to build on their
one good thing an entire system under the title of "Motorpathy."
[Footnote: I see that some scholar has lately got hold of them and
forced them to respect philological canons by kicking the mongrel out
of their dictionary and calling themselves _Kinesipathists_,
instead of the other Graeco-Latin barbarism.] The "_Movement
Cure_" contains some very good ideas, which, like many of the
Hydropathists', ought to be taken up by Science, in whose hands and
their proper place they can do fine service.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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