The Herbal Medicine-Maker's Handbook_ A Home Manual - James Green [131]
A chapter on hydrotherapy has to begin by first dipping its toe in the water. Water is an enchanting phenomenon, exhibiting remarkably diverse physical properties and modifications in its chameleon-like chemical antics. In its pure state, water is a transparent liquid, lacking color, taste, and smell. Pure water has been highly esteemed by science’s assumption that its specific gravity is unity (1.0), and forms the term of comparison for the specific gravities of all other solids and liquids, earmarking water as the apple of gravity’s eye.
Not to be totally unyielding, this provocative substance allows itself to be compressed, but only to the merest extent. When reduced to 32° F. (0° C.), water freezes and becomes solid, forming transparent crystals of ice, and when raised to 212° F. (100° C.), it boils and transforms into an elastic gas. Water’s thermo-antics have also been honored by scientists by selecting it as their standard for specific heat, marking it as the official glint in the sun’s resplendent eye.
As steam, water’s bulk increases nearly 1700-fold, and its celebrated liquid specific gravity diminishes to merely half that of atmospheric air where it ascends sun bound, leaving gravity to court other elements for the time being. This impetuosity is understandable, for the essence of water’s parental lineage, hydrogen and oxygen, is obviously a gaseous one, and it is only judicious for an offspring to commingle with family whenever possible. Then inevitably, while frolicking with its airy kin, gaseous water condenses into minute drops (which explains why steam appears opaque). And likewise, in a bigger picture, the over-saturation of air with water vapor causes a similar condensation in the atmosphere where water makes its appearance, this time with an expansive gesture as opaque clouds, preparing for its inevitable return as rain to the patient and willful arms of Earth’s gravity.
At the temperature of 39° F. (4° C.), pure water attains its maximum density where one cubic centimeter weighs precisely one gram, and increases its bulk and decreases its specific gravity when either heated or cooled. Therefore, as steam, water expands and rises into the air, and as ice it expands and floats upon itself.
In the world of liquids, gases, and chemical compounds, water is definitely not known as abstinent, for it is a voracious entity with the power and appetite to dissolve many salts and more or less all gases, including common air, the constituents of which are always present in natural water. Therefore, natural water is rarely found in its purest state.
Globally, water is forever uniformly present in the atmosphere in the guise of an invisible vapor, even in the driest weather, and, as we all have experienced, exerts a vital influence on comfort, and on the animal and vegetable economy of our planet. Water unites with other bodies either in liquid or solid form, producing in the former case solutions, and in the latter case hydrates; therefore, when a vegetable or animal body is deficient in water it is considered dehydrated.
This chapter is both an ode to the mind boggling restorative power of simple water baths and a therapeutic reference for treating acute physical discomforts and chronic maladies. But the heart of the chapter is its introduction to you of the quick cold-water plunge which is probably the most efficient, reliable, and free health tonic known to the human body. Enough said—see this page.
Water as the universal solvent has a profound influence in the operations of nature. Water by far constitutes the major portion of the mass of all living beings, and it is as essential to their organic physical nature as it is to the molecular actions and movements by which life is manifested. Water constitutes the basis of nearly all the secretions of the body, and nine-tenths of the weight of the blood. Consequently, water can be seen as an important article of food, which not only directly supplies one constituent of the body but also supplies a means of promoting the solution of solid food in the gastrointestinal