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314 ESOTERIC ANTHROPOLOGY.
kind of a quick thorough wash-down with cold water.
A good wiping and rubbing
with coarse towels and the
bare hands, completes the operation.
Some of our water-cure doctors have got up a fancy
for giving wet-sheet packs of only fifteen or twenty
minutes long. These may be very good as invigorating
baths, but I am sure that they do not act upon the skin
so as thoroughly the ones longer ; and where patients
react slowly, a pack of twenty minutes is a hardly be
ginning. The rubbing wet- sheet, or what I have called
the dripping sheet, must be about as as good these short
packs. In fevers, however, they may do very well ;
and must be of service in any case where there is quick
reaction.
There is no absolute time for a wet-sheet pack. One
patient may be hot, restless, and even in a perspiration
in half an hour ; another may warm up slowly, and re
quire to stay in two hours. When the pack is likely to
be a long one, let the patient empty the bladder just
before going in. In long packs, a urinal may also be
put in, so as to be used without coming out.
For. children, the blankets maybe folded, and the
sheets made of a proportional size. Infants a week old
take the full wet-sheet packs with great advantage. In
all the diseases of infancy, in the inflammation and irri
tation of teething, in pain of the bowels, in feverishness,
it is a specific. In measles, chicken-pox, and scarlet
fever, it can not be too soon resorted to, nor scarcely
too often repeated, except in delicate children, where
packing in the wet sheet, after the fever, is resorted to,
may be injurious. It brings out these eruptions in the
the most wonderful manner. The crossest, sickest