During the nineteenth century many medical sectarians arose to challenge the heroic treatment of the allopaths with their insistence on bleeding, blistering, purging, and dosing with calomel. The hydropaths, one of the most influential of these sects, rejected all drugs and placed their faith solely in natural cures such as fresh air, sunshine, exercise, natural diet (often vegetarian), and above all, water, which they used in every conceivable way.Mrs Mary Gove Nichols, a nonphysician health reformer, opened a water-cure establishment in New York City about 1848. She believed that the spread of hydropathy would eventually make physicians obsolete.Mrs Nichols1 described how a friend's child was "murdered by the ignorance, and the time-honored death-dealing system of Allopathy." This event led her to embrace the "water-cure" method which she forcefully popularized during the middle part of the last century. She wrote:A mother...mourned all the time for a child of four years, who had been seized with croup. The mother was thrust out of the room, and the door locked by her family physician, because she was averse to bleeding, and then the child was bled into a dead fainting fit, and revived to take dose after dose of calomel, till the doctor gave her up to die, and another distinguished allopathic physician was sent for. He decided that the only chance of saving the child was to compel it to breathe the fumes of burning calomel. This was done five times; the child struggled so as to escape from the father, who held her with all his force, and ran across the room.
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