The treatment of gastro-hepatic dyspepsia at Vichy, Carlsbad, and Cheltenham / by Gustave Monod.

  • Monod, Gustave.
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The treatment of gastro-hepatic dyspepsia at Vichy, Carlsbad, and Cheltenham / by Gustave Monod. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    honest analyses; for mineral waters must be regarded as dynamic entities, and the only trustworthy guide to their use is clinical experience, which cannot be learnt from any book. If, therefore, I bring together in this paper three spas in many wTays so dissimilar as Cheltenham, Vichy, and Carlsbad, it is solely because patients of the same category may find at each of them the treatment which their condition demands. Take the list of indications displayed by every station, we shall assuredly find, in bold relief, the word—dyspepsia. And justly so ; for should not dyspepsia really be written in the plural, and cannot hydrology in one way or another adapt itself to almost every conceivable require- ment? Nevertheless, to alkaline and alkaline sulphated waters preference would commonly be accorded on theoretical grounds alone, and it is sufficiently wTell known that clinical results have fully justified such selection. If we were asked for the formula of what is called a “digestive’’ water, it is more than probable that we should, in the first instance, think of a solution of sodium bicarbonate of medium strength, say five parts per mille ; while influenced by recent research we should render the solution isotonic. As for the temperature, it would doubtless be that of the body—perhaps a little higher. The outcome of these efforts would be the manufacture of the water which gushes forth near the banks of the River Allier; or to be more precise, we should have a close imitation, lacking, however, as we hold, that impalpable quality (the nescio quid divinum of hydrologists) which gives to natural mineral waters their life and thus their unique merit. To offer a more prosaic conjecture, these qualities may be due to minimal quantities of the other salts in solution, to continuous synthesis, as described by Gautier, to radio-activity—or to some kindred property to be discovered by the Curies of the future. However this may turn out to be, for proof that mineral waters created by Nature herself differ from products of the chemist’s laboratory, I appeal to the testimony of thousands of patients whose united experience dates back for centuries : for to quote President Lincoln’s quaint and pithy phrase, “ though you may fool some of the people part of the time, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” I must now ask you to betake yourselves in imagination to the centre of France, to a gently undulating country at the foot of the last spurs of the volcanic mountains of Auvergne. Under the soil there will be found a sheet of bicarbonated water, which has come from far, and doubtless from great depths, emerging here and there in springs, hotter or cooler, and more or less charged with divers salts according to the speed of the