BRISTOL-water. These waters are the fourth in degree amongst the waters which are esteemed warm. The waters of Bath are the first, Buxton the second, and Matlock the third.
Bath waters are beneficial, when the secretions from the blood are diminished; Bristol, when too much increased: Bath attenuates powerfully; Bristol increscates: Bath is spirituous, and helps defects; Bristol is more cooling, and suppresses plentitude, with its consequences, inflammations and haemorrhages.
If we may judge of the contents of Bristol waters, from their effects, which are exceedingly detersive and healing; they partake chiefly of chalk, lapis calcarius, and calaminaris, the virtues of which are too dry to cleanse; they fill ulcers with flesh, and cicatrize them.
But whatever the substances are that impregnate them, it is plain they are very subtile, and that there is but little of a terrestrial part in them, from their specific lightness above other waters: Yet when we consider how agreeable to the sight, smell and taste; how clear, pure and soft they are; their gentle degree of heat, so adapted to sundry diseases; it must be concluded, that those waters do imbibe some salutary particles in their passage through the earth; and, from the many cures yearly wrought by them, that they have an undoubted title to a place in the first class of medicinal waters.
The diseases in which Bristol waters are properly prescribed, are internal haemorrhages and inflammations, blood-spitting, dysentery, and immoderate flux of the menses, purulent ulcers of the viscera: Hence, in consumptions, the dropsy, scurvy with heat, stone, gravel, strangury; the habitual gout, scorbutic rheumatism, diabetes, flow-fevers, atrophy, pox, cancer, gleets in both sexes, king's evil, &c.; in all these disorders, Bath waters are not only improper, but hurtful; they rouse the too languid, and quicken the too lazy circulation; they allay the heat, and restrain the too rapid motion of the blood. Those impregnate the phlegmatic, these temperate the choleric constitution. Bath water seems to be adapted to the maladies of the stomach, guts, and nerves; Bristol, to those of the lungs, kidneys, and bladder: Again, Bath waters are at variance with a milk course; and the Bristol can never be judiciously directed, but when they may be joined with reason and success.
The
The Bristol waters are taken medicinally only during the hot months, as from April to September.