Page:Macfadden's Fasting, Hydropathy and Exercise.djvu/99

Rh the very instincts that would lead him to abandon drug-traditions for a new gospel of hygiene.

He was no learned man, in the college sense of the word, but had read a good deal and thought more, and his arguments had the force born of intense conviction. Besides, his own experience was an argnmentum ad hominem, and one by one his afflicted neighbors tried the inexpensive prescriptions of the water-doctor. Reformed topers felt their shattered nerves braced as no drugs, no ointments and strengthening diet had braced them before. Rickety youngsters improved till they could join in the sports of their contemporaries and often beat them at their own game. Invalids with one foot in the grave regained their vantage ground on the upper tablelands of health, and one old soldier became so enthusiastic a champion of the new sanitary creed that his savage denunciations of drug-mongers more than once got him into serious trouble.

Squire Priessnitz himself never indulged in invectives, and kept his temper even when the neighboring physicians got him indicted for kurpfuscherie—the unauthorized practise of medicine; "mal-practice" being a term they could not apply to his case, as there were no plaintiffs