A Boycotted Cure

Manawatu Standard, Volume XL, Issue 7061, 22 July 1901, Page 4

A Boycotted Cure

A London paper makes the serious charge against the medical profession that, as a whole, it ignores a new method of treating disease, " only because the treatment happens to be the discovery or invention of a layman." This is the Tallerman treatment of rheumatism, gout, sciatica, lumbago, and other kindred ills. The treatment is a matter of dry heat. "The patient's affected limb is placed in a copper cylinder, and subjected to a heat of 240deg. to 300deg. This temperature would boil, stew, fry, bake, or otherwise cook the aforesaid lirnbj but for tho ingenious arrangement, by which the air within the cylinder is kept perfectly dry. This arrangement enables heat to be applied locally to a degree which has hitherto been impossible." The effect of this treatment, as described by the writer, is wonderful. People who had been crippled and tortured for years by rheumatism were able to walk, raise rheir arms, bend their limbs, and do almost all that anyone in perfect health could do. The cure has received the highest praise in quarters where praise is not lightly given. Such authorities as the Lancet, the Medical Press and Circular, the Journal of State Medicine, the Clinical Journal, and the leading medical publications of France, Germany, Austria, the United States, and Canada ; the physicians of St. Bartholo-, mew's, Charing Cross, North-west London, University College, the German, the London, and King's I College hospitals, and also of the great hospitals of Paris, Berlin, New York, Philadelphia, Montreal, and the English'provinces and colonies, together with many professors—all have tested and have reported favorably upon the system. Yet it is declared that it is practically tabooed by practitioners •in general, and remains to a very large extent out of the line of ordinary medical practice. If this is so, one cannot but think that something remains to be said on the other side, and yet all those high "authorities of the profession would hardly lend their countenance and approval to a method of treating a painful disease unless it were of such a character as should commend it to the entire'medical profession.