Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/194

 blanket as before. When the perspiration has lasted from fifteen to twenty minutes, throw aside the blanket, and plunge into a tub already filled with cold water, or take a cold shower bath.

The only warning needed in this procedure—but that is an important one—is not to allow the body to become cooled between the hot and the cold stages. The transition must be sudden, and the cold dip or shower must last but for a second or two, otherwise trouble may result.

The effects of frequent and long-continued tepid bathing on the skin is so salutary, that recently Professor Hebra, of Vienna, one of the most celebrated physicians of skin diseases now living—probably we ought to say the most celebrated—has adopted the plan of placing some of his obstinate cases in water up to the neck, and leaving them there for several days! That is, they are tied up in a caoutchouc sack through which a stream of water is constantly flowing.

This is not a novel plan in Europe. At the mineral springs there, which are celebrated for their virtue in skin diseases, the patients enter the bath, which is a large basin from fifty to a hundred feet square, filled with tepid water to the depth of three feet or so, and remain for hours. A few years ago we passed some time at the baths of Louéche-les-Bains in Switzerland, in the valley of the Upper Rhone. Every day we saw from fifty to a hundred guests of both sexes seated on