Page:Macfadden's Fasting, Hydropathy and Exercise.djvu/121

Rh legislators, but every time they felt a hankering after roast spare-ribs they thought it necessary to set a house afire.

Yet the price of an old Chinese farmstead cabin can hardly have exceeded that of an American ticket to Woerishofen, where the presiding priest of the new temple of health compels his converts to perform barefoot gallopades in a wet clover-field. No doubt a good many of them do get their money's worth in improved health, but the physiological value of Father Kneipp's prescription is simply that of a refrigeration cure, and every one of his forty-odd thousands of yearly visitors—some of them from distant Canada—would have derived exactly the same amount of benefit from a sponge-bath in the woodshed of his native ranch. The hindfoot plan of the Woerishofen prophet is, in fact, nothing but localized hydrotherapy, out and out less efficacious that the system of Squire Priessnitz, and efficacious at all only by virtue of long-continued repetitions. Special virtues of dew-moisture? Of South-German varieties of clover? Believe it, if you can, but stop smiling at Qwang-Soo pork procedures.

All there is of sense in the semi-mystic circulars of the clover-patch Æsculapius is founded on