Jean de Carro

“ It is generally ascertained that our water’s dissolve the callus of fractured bones, and that opinion seems to have no other support than a single fact, faithfully related, but falsely interpreted. It has, however, produced as much sensation as if confirmed by daily experience. ”

“ Innumerable visitors, coming from countries where tea is as common a beverage (England, Russia, Poland, Holland) as coffee in Germany and France, many would find it excessively hard, as they did formerly at Carlsbad, to give up their habitual mode of breakfasting. The fact is that tea does not excite the blood-vessels, as much as coffee; that it acts more directly on the nervous system, and keeps awake those who are not accustomed to it, or who take it immoderately strong; that such effects are never felt by people who drink it daily; that those who never drank it, should not begin at Carlsbad ”

“ A peristyle, a long colonade, the elegant hall of the bath-house, a flower-garden, with a good band of music, offer to innumerable drinkers an agreable walk, during the whole season, whatever may be the weather. ”

“ Our waters acting not only upon the bowels and kidneys, but promoting perspiration, and requiring of course warm weather, June, July and August are always at Carlsbad the fullest time of the season. Those who are fond of a brilliant crowd, and not afraid of paying higher prices for lodgings, should come from the 15th of June to the 15th of August; but those to whom a bustling life is rather an annoyance than a pleasure, should be here from the 1st of May to the 15th of June, or from the 15th of August to the 30th of September. ”

“ WITHOUT submitting our invalids to useless privations and painful abstinences, a regular regimen must, however, accompany the use of a mineral water, which excites so manifestly the vascular system, and the action of the bowels, kidneys and skin. The few rules of our dietetic code are seldom transgressed with impunity. ”

“ Certain individuals have, no doubt, a kind of elective attraction for one source or for the other, and obtain from that spring all sorts of good effects, whilst another one will act perhaps differently. Such individualities must be attended to and particularly respected, but the closest attention to the effects of our various wells is insufficient for classing them a priori, according to the diseases in which they prove more or less useful. The great question, in sending patients to Carlsbad, is not to decide which source they should drink, but whether our waters are indicated or not. ”

“ Of the articles of diet allowed, beef and mutton are of good quality; veal, chicken and pidgeons are very seldom properly fed; venison (deer) and ducks are always to be had; partridges, pheasants and hares in their season; porc and goose are forbidden; vegetables are neither plentiful nor cheap, and not all salutary. Carp, pike and trouts are in general to be had, but particularly on fast-days, and all that class of farinaceous compounds, called Mehlspeisen, are perfectly well understood at Carlsbad. Made dishes and scientific ragouts are never to be met with, except when particularly ordered. ”

“ Religious tolerance being complete in the Austrian dominions, I shall remark, for the tranquillity of those who might not be aware of it, that a part of the catholic church-yard is devoted to protestants, who are buried openly, and allowed to have their own funeral service performed by a clergyman of their confession, if they wish it, and if there happens to be one at Carlsbad, among the visitors. ”

“ The citizens of Carlsbad are in general civil and obliging, and strangers, travelling without servants, find in every house the necessary attendance. They are industrious; all sorts of workmen and tradespeople are found amongst them, and they have even acquired some renown in the fabrication of fire-arms, cabinet-work, cutlery and pins; the incrustations produced by the fixed parts of the waters, called Sprudel-stones, are an object of industry. A number of tradesmen of all sorts come, during the season, from Prague and Vienna ”

“ That natural, telluric, heat is mild, penetrating and comfortable, even to 36°—40° R., which can be considered as the middle temperature of those steam-baths, supported by some patients even to 44—46° R., whilst the vapour of common water, heated in a kettle, is sharp, burning and intolerable in a few moments, under far inferior temperature. We have, as already mentioned, general and partial steam-baths, and if the patient takes only a half-bath, that is to say, if he sits in the box up to the pit of the stomach, he bears a few degrees of heat more than in a whole bath. ”

“ Without attempting a methodical solution of this problem, one can conceive how an alkaline substance, reaching, more or less slowly, the last ramifications of our secretory and excretory organs, produces effects not to be expected from coarser medicaments, administered only in small doses, such as antimony, gums, soap, ox-gall, vegetable juices or extracts. Whoever has experienced at Carlsbad a regular crisis, will never more question the power of its waters, the revolution they cause in the whole system, nor the artificial disease excited by such perturbations. ”

“ Such mistakes, caused by an imperfect knowledge of the effects of our waters, are but too frequent. Supported by hope, the journey to the wells was at least tolerable; but, deprived of all further illusions, the way home is dreadful. More than one arrives here every year to be buried, without having been able to drink a single drop of the water from which he expected recovery, or at least great relief. ”

“ Every house owner is provided with a bathing-room, a bathing-tub, and buckets to carry the water.
According to comparative experiments made last year by Dr. Romberg of Berlin and myself, in order to ascertain a point contested by many, the Sprudel water lost 211⁄2° R., and common water, artificially heated, 33° R, in half an hour.
The advantages of steam-baths had long been praised, and patients at Carlsbad had now and then imagined some imperfect mode of applying vapour in various ailments, rheumatism, gout, contractions of limbs, but without any methodical principles. ”

“ WHEN I left Vienna, after thirty-three years practice, in the spring of 1826, to recover at Carlsbad my health totally impaired by gouty affections, and to pursue there my medical career, the english visitors scarcely amounted to twenty, and the greater part of those came not directly from England, but were sent by continental physicians, whom they had consulted in the course of their travels. ”

“ Considering the advantages which might arise from the extraction of such an enormous quantity of soda in a country, like Bohemia, where so much glass is manufactured, several speculators have been struck with the utility of an undertaking, which Mr. Berzelius (Almanach de Carlsbad, 1835, ch. III) thinks easy and infallible. The citizens of Carlsbad, it is true, believe still that whatever is extracted from their springs and sold abroad, must be detrimental to the prosperity of the place ”

“ The human frame, endowed with a power of reaction, cannot be compared to a glass or earthen vessel, nor to any cavities of inanimate bodies; the physiological processes, which dissolve, elaborate and assimilate substances introduced in the alimentary tube, differ entirely from the chemical and physical operations taking place upon inorganic bodies; a patient, drinking, in one morning, twelve beakers of mineral water, swallows scarcely eighteen grains of their fixed parts ”

“ Highly protected by the counts Schlick, to whom the greatest part of the royal domain of Ellbogen, and even Carlsbad, was mortgaged for the money they often lent to the kings of Bohemia, those rich and mighty noblemen sent Payer to Italy at their own expense. Inflammed by the sight of the remains of ancient baths and of some modern bathing establishments, he paid, on his return home, a particular attention to the hot springs of Carlsbad, where he first recommanded their internal use and the douche, so much employed then in Italy. ”

“ The coockery is plain and alike every where, and no invalid has reason to fear the temptation of dishes contrary to the laws of the cure, about which all inn-keepers have traditional and almost invariable principles, suggested by the medical Faculty. Besides, regimen and diet are always a subject of advice at the first interview between the physician and the patient. ”

“ That tax (Cur-Tax) is four florins silver a head; children under fifteen years, as well as domestics, are free from it; children above fifteen, coming with their parents, pay the half-tax. That revenue is entirely devoted to useful establishments and embellishments.
Carlsbad, sixty german miles distant from Vienna, and sixteen from Prague, is situated in a deep and narrow valley, between granitic rocks, on both sides of the Teple, which throws itself into a larger river, the Egra, very near the town. The houses are all built on the declivity of the hills, and on the banks of the Teple. ”

“ Fabian Summer, a native of Carlsbad, speaks, in 1571, off Sudaria communia, without describing that sweating establishment, so that now no body knows whether they were, like russian baths, prepared with the vapour of common water, or composed of the Sprudel vapour, which requires another mode of application, on account of its effects upon the organs of respiration. Enormous clouds of vapour rose, during: ages, from our hot wells, lost in the wide atmosphere. ”

“ An English lady, four and twenty years of age, the last of a family swept off by consumption, had enjoyed good health, till she married, in her seventeenth year. After her first confinement with puerperal fever, in 1821, she lingered fifteen months. The existence of gall-stones being suspected, she was sent to Cheltenham, whose saline waters brought on a miscarriage (at Carlsbad we never allow pregnant women to drink) , followed by an excessive weakness, which yielded to proper regimen and the sea-side. ”

“ The fact is that patients offer very different capacities of swallowing and digesting mineral waters, as gluttons and drunkards beat sober people in eating, and in drinking wine or beer; and that we still see at Carlsbad individuals who would astonish their forefathers, if they saw them taking from thirty to fifty goblets as a daily portion. Such drinkers are rare, but they exist (Almanach for 1833, ch. IV) . ”

“ Coffee, in one word, should never be allowed to invalids, whose abdominal organs give such signs of inflammation or sensibility to the touch, as to require leeches, or any other part of the antiphlogistic treatment, so often necessary with our patients.
Chocolate does not produce the same irritative effects as coffee, so remarkable for the subtility of its aromatic principles, and still less a plain decoction of cocoa; but few people digest well and relish chocolate for any length of time, as they do coffee or tea. ”

“ Soda acts with energy on the animal economy, and has a hurtful influence on the arterial system, disposes to hemorrhagies, to scurvy, and disturbs digestion. The Carlsbad water, on the contrary, during the longest cure, animates and vivifies, excites appetite, promotes digestion, and, united to proper regimen, favours the return of health. ”

“ The answer is the more difficult, as in the absolute impossibility of reaching the hearth which imparts it, we shall never know the means employed by Nature to form it, nor how that water is impregnated with substances, of which, as far as investigations have shewn, the mountains of Carlsbad contain too little to account for the enormous quantities of sulfate and carbonate of soda, emitted from the wells, in the course of only one year. ”

“ The Sprudel water boils eggs hard, and is employed, since time immemorial, to scalding poultry and pigs, and to other such purposes, which are more oeconomical than grateful to the eye. The difference of temperature between fountains, coming from the same reservoir, is generally accounted for by the various distances of their orifice from the great focus, and by the warmer or cooler soil upon which the water circulates in the impenetrable meanders of this aquatic volcano. ”

“ Berzelius (without speaking of those which may perhaps be hereafter discovered) , and particularly by their high temperature, which, volatilizing those constituent parts, so wonderfully united and combined together, conveys them, by the finest ramifications, to the last extremities of our organism, imparts to them a vivifying power, and deprives them of their hurtful qualities. ”

“ Before a mineral spring acquires renown, it is in general known in its neighbourhood alone, till successful cases attract the attention of physicians and of the owners of the soil, who then form establishments for the accommodation of visitors. Such was very likely the fate of Carlsbad, called formerly and still now, by the neighbouring peasants: Warmbad. ”

“ The most elegant are on the Wiese and on the Market-Place, and more expensive than those situated in the higher and more remote streets. In most houses the beds are good, at least as good as in any part of Germany, though many tall visitors wish them longer, and the coverlids broader. The price of lodgings varies with their situation and the season, which begins with the 1st May and lasts to the end of September. It is not rare, however, to see patients at Carlsbad in April and October (5) . ”

“ Excellent roads, quicker stage-coaches, steam-boats, better accommodations, useful improvements in the town itself, successful treatments, have increased the fame of our hot springs, upon which, since 1521, innumerable latin and german books have been published, some of them by physicians of universal renown, such as Frederick Hoffmann and Tralles in the eighteenth century, Hufeland and Kreysig in the nineteenth. ”