SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

In this series of articles published in The Water-Cure Journal over the course of little more than a year, Nichols discusses a range of cases that he treated by applications of the water-cure. He explicitly describes these articles as complementary to his An Introduction to the Water-Cure (IX: 6, 186). Whereas the latter is a more theoretical exposition of the tenets of hydropathy, this series of articles focuses on the practical issues, hence the discussion of twenty-six specific cases. The diseases and ailments about which Nichols writes range from scrofula to rheumatism, consumption, asthma, and measles.

A diet “of the purest and simplest character, excluding flesh and grease” is part of most of his treatments (IX: 6, 187: “Scrofulous Ophthalmia”). The main reason to avoid animal food is that it tends to induce diseases like scrofula. This is particularly the case with animals that are “domesticated, … closely confined, and fattened for food” (X: 2, 59). Children, Nichols insist, are particularly prone to malnutrition, “as almost all the diseases of infancy are those of nutrition” (X:3, 117). He is severely critical of the dietary prescriptions of “allopathic physician[s]” and their attempts to cure with “beefsteaks and porter” (X: 5, 190). In most cases, what is really needed is in fact a “bland and sparing vegetable diet” (XII: 2, 32: “Chronic Inflammation of the Bowels”).