Pilgrimages to the Spas in Pursuit of Health and Recreation With an Inquiry into the Comparative Merits of Different Mineral Waters

Many tribes of the great John Bull family appear, of late years, to have abjured “red port” and “brown stout,” in favour of several breweries on the Continent, and especially in Germany. These breweries are deeply seated in the bowels of the Earth, and the art and mystery of their brewings are far beyond the sight and cognizance of man. Whether cocculus Indicus, logwood, sloe-juice, or opium enter into their gigantic vats and boiling cauldrons, it is hard to say; but, however manufactured, they are thrown up on the surface of our globe, pro bono publico—greatly to the detriment of doctors, druggists, and apothecaries, in this and in many other countries.

The subterranean distilleries are conducted on the homœopathic principle—viz. that of employing the minutest quantities of active materials—probably in order to do the least possible harm. They have many and great advantages over the homœopathic laboratories. They diffuse their ingredients through such immense potions of water, that, to get at a few grains of the former, we are obliged to ingurgitate some quarts of the latter. Now the mere mechanical flow of such prodigious doses of fluid through the various outlets—the bowels, kidneys, skin, &c. must sweep away morbid secretions, and contribute to the breaking down of obstructions in different organs, independently of the medicinal agents that are diffused through the mass of liquids in the greatest possible state of division and solution—circumstances which enable them to permeate and penetrate through innumerable capillary tubes and complicated glandular apparatuses, where grosser materials could never reach.

The natural fountains of Hygeia, however, have other advantages and auxiliaries, of which the laboratory of the chemist, and the pharmacy of the practitioner are deprived. Hope itself, though often resting on fallacious and exaggerated histories of cures, contributes much to the accomplishment of even marvellous recoveries. The severing, or even relaxing of that chain which binds care round the human heart, and augments the sufferings and the progress of disease, is no mean ally of the spa.