of investigation was the cause of a sudden
and unexpected death. It is, therefore, not
impossible that had a more complete and
searching examination of the body been
made, some morbid condition, sufficient to
produce death, might have been discovered."

The committee state that, when the case
was left to them, they called on Mr. Snape
for his defence, which they submitted to six
medical men of eminence, three chosen by
Mr. Snape, three by themselves. The eminence
of these six gentlemen was unquestionable.
They were—by choice of the committee—Dr.
Addison, Dr. Sutherland, and Dr. Todd; by
choice of Mr. Snape, Dr. Babington, Dr.Quain,
and Mr. Bowman. The result, we may say,
at once, was Mr. Snape's reinstatement in his
office, with the admission that, in certain
particulars, his conduct was not unobjectionable.
The most important of these, were his
not communicating the circumstance of the
lengthened bath to the coroner and jury at
the inquest; his not having stated the
length of this bath and of all unusual baths
in the case-book, instead of entering in that
record the general term—shower-bath—from
which it would be erroneously inferred that
the baths had been of the ordinary description
of one or two minutes' duration; and
his not having reported this alteration in
his mode of treatment to the medical world
and the committee.

The main point of Mr. Snape's defence,
is, that the long shower-bath treatment was
a discovery of his own: a curative measure
of which he had proved the efficacy by five
years' experience without one instance of
evil result, and which was regarded with
distrust by other practitioners, simply according
to the common fate of all discoveries when
they are new. He sets out by expressing
the desire he has had, not merely to relieve
patients, but to cure them. He has been
attached, during eight years, to the Asylum,
and he shows—by a detail of the improvements
he has introduced, and by the fact
that he has never once been charged with
unkindness—that his career in it has been
that of a surgeon who had the welfare of
his patients at heart, and has been zealous,
even to excess of zeal, in the fulfilment of
his duty. With a wife, and a family of eight
children dependent upon his labour, he was, by
a painful accident, called upon to meet a
grave and ruinous charge, powerfully urged.
Medicine, he says, is a science of surmise:—

"The obscurity of pathology of mental disorders"
is specially adverted to in Dr. Conolly's recent work,
and he expressly ascribes "our limited knowledge of
remedial means applicable to mental disorders to the
extreme obscurity in which the original cerebral
disturbance is involved, and to the narrowness of our
knowledge of the mental functions of the brain."
"But," he observes, " there is still no reason to
abandon the hope that fresh resources will some day
be possessed by the practitioner, and that the real
nature of the changes taking place in the brain may
be better understood, and greater success attend
medical treatment."

When, then, it is admitted by the most noted
practitioner in insanity of the present day that so little
is known, and so much yet remains to be discovered
and even hoped for, why am I to be denounced as a
barbarous practitioner for advocating a treatment which
I have practically proved to be so good and valuable
in itself (I am at present speaking of twenty minutes'
continuous shower-baths), because others who have
not tried this treatment consider it dangerous and
unsafe? Thus to condemn me, would be to make
theory preferable to practice, and would sweep away
the result of my last four or five years' most valuable
experience, during which time I have been in the
frequent habit of administering continuous cold shower-
baths to insane patients for periods of fifteen and
twenty minutes, with and without intermissions of a
few seconds, with the greatest success. I never knew
the slightest ill result, and instances can be given of
entire restoration to reason by one single fifteen or
twenty minutes' continuous bath: added to which,
there are cases, which I should have proved had my
case gone to trial, in which discharged patients have
imputed their restoration solely to these long baths.

When the late Mr. George Stephenson was asked by
a Commons Railway Committee, in the year eighteen
hundred and thirty-six, whether a railway train could
travel at the rate of a mile a minute without danger, his
sagacious reply was, " Yes, but the public mind is not yet
prepared to receive that truth as a fact." Such is precisely
the present state of the shower-bath question. These
continuous shower-baths, if the weight and fall of water
be of moderate height, are not distressing; whereas
intermittent baths, which are not nearly so beneficial,
are distressing; for while the continuous bath after the
first burst and shock is only an equable flow of water
over the body, the intermittent bath, being a series of
fresh and separated falls of cold water on the body
when it is wet from the previous shocks, and the
patient is shivering, produces a much more chilling
and disagreeable sensation, than a continuous and
unbroken stream. In fact, intermission or non-
intermission of the stream, rather than the length of duration
of the bath, is the principal point of difference
between myself and others. What is the purpose for
which shower-baths are recommended? "The prostration
of the system "— " the overpowering of the
patient." Thus, Dr. Conolly, in his last work,
recommends the use of intermittent shower-baths at
short intervals, "until decided prostration ensues;"
adding that, "employed in the ordinary manner, its
effects are rather exciting than depressing; and
Dr. Elliotson, who tried the bath in question and was
retained to give evidence against me, in his work on
"The Principles and Practice of Medicine," says,
when adverting to the treatment of mania, "Warm
and cold baths are found very useful, but it is
in melancholia that warm baths answer best. The
cold bath, in most cases of insanity where patients
glow after it, is an exceedingly useful measure; and
in violent paroxysms, a cold shower-hath, continued
till the patient is nearly overpowered, has often
beneficial influence. As a means of remedy in chronic
cases also, the shower-bath is one of the best things
that can be employed."

The shower-bath is, for a few seconds, a
stimulant; but Mr. Snape adduces the
evidence to show that eminent men have
advised its prolongation until it shall have
produced depression and sickness. This was