Page:Quackery Unmasked.djvu/201

Rh and drink; but if the patient is very hungry, he allows him for one or two days to take a very little dry stale biscuit, but no drink of any kind is allowed, and the stale biscuits are given up or withheld after the second day. This course is continued from two to eight days, as the patient can bear it; he says the longer it is continued, the better. When he thinks the process has been carried far enough, he takes his patient out of the wet blankets, and commences giving him a little wine, then light food, and if upon inspection he becomes satisfied that the patient is thoroughly cured, he lets him go; but if not, after a short interval he puts him through the same process a second, or if necessary a third time.

This operation Schrott calls a "new birth," and declares that such a renovation is "as necessary for a man, as for a snake to change his skin." He supposes that men, like cattle, are liable to become hide-bound, and need to be soaked and rubbed. Perhaps some of my readers may suppose that this treatment is so extremely ridiculous and painfully irksome, that no one would submit to it; but if we may believe