(at Carlsbad) et nunquam bibunt ex eo. Persons labouring under cutaneous disorders, leprosy and other external evils, drove then to Carlsbad. We see there now more diseases arising from visceral obstructions. Mathaeus Collinus de Choterina (born in 1516, † 1566), a good poet and a celebrated professor of the Greek language at the University of Prague, (where the marble monument erected to him is still to be seen), expresses, in the following lines, his wishes that a powerful friend of his, going to Carlsbad, may be cured of the itch, and the consort of that friend, of her sterility:
Unda tepens vestros scabie, precor, allevet artus,
Foecundam sociam reddat et illa tuam
Payer’s advice was slowly adopted, and great vicissitudes have been observed, since his time, in the mode of bathing and of drinking. Formerly, and particularly during the sixteenth century, patients remained six or eight hours a day, and even longer, in the bath. A specimen of that extraordinary method, still followed at Louèche (Leuk), and in other Swiss Baths, is described in the very remarkable Journal, kept in 1571, at Carlsbad, by Dr. George Handsch of Limusa, physician to archduke Ferdinand of Tirol and his wife Philippine Velser, of Augsburg. That journal, published in my Almanach, for 1832, ch. V, is unquestionably the most instructive document we possess on thermal practice during the middle age. Philippine submitted, with an angelical resignation, at
