SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

As its title suggests, this is an account in four installments of Mary Nichols' experience of the water-cure. The first installment in volume VII gives a short summary of her medical education (40), which is largely based on her personal experience of illnesses and their attempted cures.

The second installment, in the same volume, promotes “simple, proper food,” which she describes as “no rich or indigestible food, such as flesh meat, hot bread, &c.” (165). She is primarily concerned with the proper nutrition and general health of infants and children. Dietary recommendations include “thin gruel,” “ripe and mealy” potatoes, and abstention from “condiments, such as mustard, pepper, oil, grease, pickles, spices, old cheese, and smoked food, and salads, and ... tea and coffee” (165). In the remainder of the text she offers several accounts of the effects of deficient nutrition, meaning “a rich and animal diet,” on infants and children, highlighting the benefits of “vegetable food, and constant application of the commonest processes of the water cure” in the case of several diseases (166), including scarlatina and measles.

The third installment in volume VIII focuses on the ill health of most women due to societal norms (no exercise, corsets, improper nutrition, incorrect medical treatment, etc.), the lack of knowledge and education to combat these, and the resulting unhealthy upbringing of children, who are given “bad food” such as “flesh” and “even pork” (37). Proper food for children, Nichols makes clear, consists of “[b]read, fruit, milk and vegetables” (38). “Flesh, gravies, grease, sweets, pastry and condiments should be especially avoided” (38), she writes.

The final installment focuses on other aspects of the water-cure.