You want to do something interesting? Go to the library stacks, pick up a nineteenth-century text on hydrotherapy—not a historical overview but the original text. I’ve seen texts of a thousand pages with the most precise instructions—you know, water temperature, length of immersion, force of spray, proper sequence of heat and cold—and all calibrated for each specific kind of diagnosis. Very impressive, very quantitative, very scientific—but it doesn’t have a goddamn thing to do with reality.
