Page:Essay on the mineral waters of Carlsbad (1835).pdf/76

 his predecessor, P. G. Schacher, wrote a good Essay on this subject: Dissertatio de thermarum Carolinarum usu in arthritide. Lips. 1709.

The Carlsbad water, acting with so much energy upon secretions and excretions, and strengthning secondarily our digestive organs, must prove useful in various forms of arthritis, so frequently combined with abdominal disorders. Experience and observation confirm every year that principle; but we can scarcely expect to entirely remove by the waters those calcareous hard concretions, which, in their advanced state, tumefy the joints. They are particularly efficacious in the wandering gout (arthritis vaga), provided patients adopt, not only during the cure, but after it, a proper regimen, and give up luxurious and epicurean habits, so apt to produce and to increase gouty disorders. We see often such dormant evils, roused by the use of the waters, which also cause pains and inflammation of the joints; they frequently bring forward herpetic and other eruptions, which relieve these pains; they even sometimes excite spontaneous blisters and vesicles of various sorts; they very often produce oedematous swellings in women’s feet, which disappear as soon as they give up drinking the waters; and all these external effects prove salutary. That oedematous swelling is mentioned by ancient authors. Gouty complaints are in general more successfully removed by abundant urine, than by copious alvine evacuations.