Treatment Of Rheumatism - Spas |
||
|
|
||
|
Spas do have something to offer those who suffer from rheumatism, as the Romans found when they reached Bath. Why they are helpful is another question.
First think of the hippopotamus, aching after a long gallop, wallowing in a nice warm mud hole; then cast your mind back to the sense of relief you experienced when you tumbled into a hot bath at the end of long game or a day's hike. Surely both of you, man and animal, like being relieved of supporting your own weight; you like the freedom of movement that water allows you and like the warmth that it likes. All of these, you may say, you can get from warm water without going to a spa.
There are other things, however, that spas have to offer besides warm water, which is why the National Health Service will pay for the patients who are most likely to benefit from them to go the hospitals, such as those at Bath and Droitwich, which are based on English spas. To see the finest flowering of the cult of the spa, both as a centre for treatment and as a social institution, you need to go to the continental spas, to Spa itself in Belgium, from which the others get their title, to Vichy to France, to Baden Baden in Germany, and so on. Each of these spas, English and Continental, is based on a warm mineral spring. On this basis has been built up a system of physical treatment including massage, gymnasium exercises and exercises in the waters. Those who apply these forms of treatment are highly skilled and together probably have more practical knowledge of what to do for rheumatism than any other body or people outside the few academic institutes established for the study of the subject.
Physical treatment is baked by strictly regulated way of life. At the continental spas you take so many drinks of the water of a certain spring so many times a day. Most of the water of a certain spring so many times a day. Most of the waters smell horrible; many are mildly laxative. Views on the merits of the waters themselves vary, but at least the taking of them ensures that you make the effort to turn up regularly at the same place; in the spa hospitals much the same result is achieved by the steady routine of ward life, day in and day out. |
||