Hoffman RM811 .F56 1715
 

            JOHN FLOYER ( 1649-1734)

    Englishman John Floyer was one of the most eccentric physicians of his time. However, he published a number of works, which depict a sensitivity for pure scientific research.
     He became an ardent, almost fanatical believer in hydrotherapy, and the benefits of bathing, He expressed this view so strenuously that many of his medical peers ridiculed him. But, he was a careful observer, and he introduced the practice of counting the rate of the pulse-beats, as well as giving an early description of the pathological changes in the lungs from emphysema.
     His lengthy treatise, Psychrolousia, or the History of Cold Bathing, published in 1701-02, is one of many books on the subject that served to support his basic thesis of the benefit of hot and cold baths. He advocated the therapy not only on purely scientific grounds, but he appealed to such irreproachable experts from antiquity as Hippocrates, Celsus, Caelius Aurelianus, and Galen, as well as to contemporary physiologists and English intellectuals.
     This copy is the fourth edition , published in London in 1715.
 
 

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