Cold water is an absolute cure for all small cuts, in the fingers, or other parts; for if you close the cut up with the thumb of your other hand, keeping it so closed for a quarter or half an hour, this will infallibly stop the bleeding: After which, if you double up a linen-rag five or six times, dip it in cold water, and apply it to the part, binding it on; this, by preventing inflammation and a flux of humours, will give nature time soon to heal it without any other application, as is seen in the common practice of surgeons when they let a man blood; for all the application they make to the vein so cut, is a pledget of linen dipped in cold water, and bound on with a fillet: For all wounds, without loss of substance, will heal of themselves, if inflammation be prevented, and the lips of the wound are kept close together. [Sidenote: _Bitings of a mad dog._] We are also informed by Van Heydon, that in his time some were of an opinion, that a person bit by a mad dog might be preserved from that symptom, called, the fear of water, which generally follows, and proves so mortal, by applying cold water to the place bitten: And this, he says, they conceive to be no unlikely thing, if there is any credit to be given to what Cornelius Celsus writes, who saith, that the only remedy in this case is, to throw the party who hath the fear of water upon him, into a pond or river, and, when plunged over head and ears, to keep him in the water till filled with it, whether he will or no; and by this means both his thirst and dread of water will be cured. For, if this immersion be of use when the person is so far gone, why should it not be of greater force in preserving from it, if speedily applied, and repeated? Now, tho’ this is mentioned by him as a probable opinion, yet experience in our days shews, that the plunging the patient into the salt water, either of the river of Thames about Gravesend, or in the salt springs in Cheshire, is the best means to prevent any evil succeeding the bite of a mad dog; they must indeed be dipped so often, as to be almost drowned before the danger is over: But it is a question whether the saltness of the water contributes any thing to this cure, since Boerhaave, the present professor at Leyden, affirms, that when men bitten by a mad dog are arrived to the fear of water, called an hydrophobia, they may be cured by blinding the patient’s eyes, and throwing of him into a pond of water often, till he seems not to be afraid of it, or but very little, and then force him to drink large quantities. [Sidenote: _Falling-sickness._]