The mild equable temperature of the Touraine climate is peculiarly adapted to afford essential relief to persons predisposed to phthisis or consumption, and those suffering from laryngeal, bronchial, and catarrhal affections, assimulating that disease. Also to invalids labouring under chronic dyspepsia, gout, and rheumatic affections, a _winter's_ residence particularly, in Tours, has frequently proved highly serviceable, and no inconsiderable benefit is experienced by persons who have contracted local disease from a residence in a tropical or unhealthy climate.
Most of the above mentioned diseases being generally induced by a continued subjection to the suddenness and excess of atmospherical vicissitudes, and which the efforts of medicine alone too frequently fail to eradicate or alleviate, it is sufficiently evident, that a removal to localities where these causes can be in a great measure obviated, is in most cases, the more commendable course the afflicted can pursue, as the one assuredly the most calculated to expedite the remedial skill of the Physician through the renovating virtues of those powerful and efficient agents, travelling and _change of air_.
When it is considered how much the natural character of the subtle and elastic fluid which surrounds the earth is changed and modified in different localities by the geographical position and physical peculiarities so variously distinguishing the respective regions of the globe, it will, we trust, readily be conceived from what has been stated of such circumstances, respecting Tours and its neighbourhood, that its prevailing climatic qualities cannot fail to be of a highly healthful tendency.
Tours, we have intimated, is too remote from the Ocean, to be prejudicially affected by its mutable influences, or by the vast stream of aqueous vapours perpetually arising from the great western waters;--it is environed by moderately elevated _absorbing_ formations,--it is situated in a broad and extensive vale, whose fertile soils are based upon a thick alluvial deposit of gravel;--while its walls are bathed by the purifying waters of a wide, rapid and limpid river.
It is from such a happy combination of natural circumstances that its atmosphere possesses the transparency and elasticity which so strikingly characterizes it; and on which of course its peculiar adaptation for the due and healthful performance of the animal functions mainly depends.