The “Water Cure” for Fevers

A few years later a doctor announced that he was able to cure more fever patients when he used milk with the brandy. Another observed that the mixture of water with the brandy, not only internally as a drink, but externally in the form of baths, was even more effective in reducing fevers.SHM 18.3

Soon there followed an announcement by an observant physician that still better results followed when milk alone was used, with no brandy. So for a time the “milk cure” for fevers attracted wide attention. Certain German physicians, who experimented with the brandy-water method, were convinced that it was a little in advance of the brand-ymilk mode, and they finally discovered that the use of “water alone” was still better than any of the other plans of treatment. Finally it was found that “water cure” was the best remedy for fevers.SHM 18.4

Regarding the mistaken instruction given to medical students about 1860, a physician wrote retrospectively forty years later:SHM 19.1

“Learned professors had their own ideas and opinions, and these ideas and opinions were generally derived from someone equally emphatic who had preceded them, probably amplified from time to time as light gradually began to show itself on the medical horizon. Yet most of their ideas and opinions had not fact, scientific or otherwise, for their basis, but an absolutely empirical origin; in other words, true science had not yet dawned upon medical practice and medical thought.”—John Janvier Black, M.D., Forty Years in the Medical Profession, 126. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1900.SHM 19.2