"Doc, I can't breathe." "Drink more water." "Doc, what about this frightful rash?" "Take a long bath."

A coworker showed me this title one day and commented, "That's kinda taking snake oil to a whole new level."

From 1846 New York, James Gully's "The Water Cure in Chronic Disease : An Exposition of the Causes, Progress, and Terminations of Various Chronic Diseases of the Digestive Organs, Lungs, Nerves, Limbs, and Skin, and of Their Treatment by Water, and Other Hygienic Means."

It's certainly a lofty claim this book's title alone seems to imply but the idea of water ("and other hygienic means") being a potentially potent tool in the treatment and curing of diseases was no doubt a fairly controversial idea in the medical world of the mid-1840's.  In fact, it would be another two decades before Joseph Lister developed a sterilization technique for medical purposes--and even longer before American medicine commonly accepted his ideas.  The modern practice of the sterilization of tools, hands, etc. prior to surgery seems an obvious necessity to us today but it wasn't until about 1890 that American surgeons largely adopted these methods.

In fact, doctors who've studied the 1881 case of assassinated U.S. president James Garfield believe that he would likely have survived his wounds if those tending to him had used sterilized tools and hands to probe his body in search of a missing bullet (Alexander Graham Bell even designed a metal detector specifically for the case but the bedsprings interfered with the function of the device).  After the shooting--which occurred a mere four months after his taking office--Garfield survived for eleven painful weeks before numerous infections (likely due to the unsterilized probing) brought about his death.