The Story of our Health Message

The Hydropathic Movement

In the summer of 1777 William Wright, a physician of Jamaica, was sailing from that island in a ship bound for Liverpool. In treating a case of typhus fever, which ended fatally, he became infected and was very ill. He prescribed for himself the usual remedies, such as taking a “gentle vomit,” followed by a “decoction of tamarinds,” and “at bedtime, an opiate, joined with antimonial wine.” He was perplexed because that even after taking a “drachm of Peruvian bark ... every hour for six hours successively,” with an occasional glass of port wine, he felt no better. He experienced decided relief, however, when he went on deck; and he noted that the colder the air, the better he felt. SHM 28.2

“This circumstance,” he reported, “and the failure of every means I had tried encouraged me to put in practice on myself what I had often wished to try on others, in fevers similar to my own.” SHM 29.1

We can only imagine his feelings of mingled apprehension and of desperate hope as he waited the result of a cold douche—three buckets of sea water which he ordered thrown over his naked body. Though “the shock was great, [he] felt immediate relief.” A few hours later his fever reappeared, and he repeated the treatment, and did it twice more on the following day. For the third day he recorded in his diary: “Every symptom vanished, but to prevent a relapse, I used the cold bath twice.” SHM 29.2

Soon another passenger was taken down with the same fever, and at his urgent request Dr. Wright ventured to give him the same treatment, and with the same gratifying result. (James Currie, M.D., Medical Reports on the Effects of Cold and Warm Water as a Remedy in Fever and Other Diseases, 1:1-4. London: Printed for T. Cadell and W. Davis, 1805.) SHM 29.3