the same time, and during five weeks, not only to frequent pharmaceutic purgatives and water drinking, but she bathed six or seven hours daily. The irritation of the skin, produced by these protracted baths, gave to that method the name of corrosio cutis, in German: Hautfresser. In Switzerland it is called la pousse or la poussée.
David Becher, in his excellent Treatise on the waters of Carlsbad (Neue Abhandlungen von dem Carlsbade, 1772), speaks of the skin-biter, as completely abandoned, and draws his description from Fabian Summer’s work: De inventione, descriptione, temperie, viribus et imprimis usu Thermarum D. Caroli IV Imperatoris libellus brevis et utilis. Lips. 1571 et 1589.
The advantages of the internal use of the waters confirmed by so many favourable cases, bathing was gradually neglected, and, though never abandoned, it became at last a secondary part of the treatment. That neglect was felt, and often blamed, by national and foreign physicians of eminence. Habits of comfort and luxury increasing and spreading rapidly in the principal German watering-places, our patients shewed so little inclination to bathe in uncomfortable and narrow private rooms, that better institutions became indispensable. Maria-Theresia ordered, iu 1762, to build, at her own expense, a bath-house near the Mühlbrunn, demolished, in 1827, as incompatible with the increase of visitors, and placed on the opposite side of the street, upon a far better
