week is sufficient, and others
where a bath every day is imperatively necessary, in far the greater
majority of cases suitable for electro-balneological treatment, a bath
every alternate day is _sufficient_, but a bath every day is
_better_--it leads to more rapid as well as certain results.

In most of the cases, a daily bath for a few days or a week, followed by
one every other day for a time, and, when the cure is about completed, a
bath twice a week, to _consolidate_ and _confirm_ the good results
obtained, has done me the best service.

I would dwell particularly on the necessity of _perseverance_ in this
treatment. The majority of cases that have come under my observation in
this connection, have been of a more or less chronic nature. In many of
these, where medicinal and other treatment had been unavailingly gone
through with for weeks, months and even years, I have found existing the
most absurd expectations with regard to the effects of the baths. People
who had made the tour of almost all the watering-places of Europe
without obtaining the slightest benefit, have come to me imbued with the
idea--whence derived I know not--that one or two baths should greatly
improve, and two or three more cure them; and when these expectations
were not realized, they would promptly discontinue treatment, fully
satisfied that electric baths were no more capable of benefiting them
than "all the other things." I do not mean to be understood for a moment
as intending to imply that ideas of this nature are shared by the
profession; I mention them simply in order to show the necessity on the
part of physicians to disabuse in this respect the minds of those
patients whom they may send for electro-balneological treatment.

In appropriate cases, the use of the bath should not be too long
deferred. I have had frequent occasion to become cognizant of the fact,
that cases have been sent by physicians to take the baths only after
prolonged ineffectual treatment of another nature had been gone through
with, and where negative or at best tardy results took the place of the
brilliant results that might have been obtained, had the cases been sent
earlier. I do not mention this in a fault-finding spirit; to do so would
be unjust. The remedy under consideration has up to the present time
been too little known, the indications for its employment--in the
absence of statistics--on too uncertain a basis, to expect from any but
specialists the ear