Letter to Friedrich Engels, September 8, 1875

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 8 September 1875


First published in English in The Letters of Karl Marx, selected and translated with explanatory notes and an introduction by Saul K. Padover, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1979
First published abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 4, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Abt. III, Bd. 4, Berlin, 1931
Printed according to the original in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 45


MARX TO ENGELS

IN RAMSGATE

Karlsbad, 8 September 1875 Germania

Dear FRED,

You will doubtless have already heard from Tussy that my first letter to her, which I handed in personally at the main post office here on 18 August in the presence of Dr Gans junior, has been intercepted, doubtless by the Prussian postal authorities. The subsequent ones have arrived; the latest, which I sent her last week, appears to have shared the fate of the first, for I should otherwise surely have had an answer from her.[1]

This time I'm really getting on splendidly with the cure; with rare exceptions good nights, too. But I am also, or so my

numerous doctor friends say, Karlsbad's model guest. From time to time these gentlemen have been at pains to lead me away from the path of 'salvation'[2] on the pretext praesente medico,[3] etc., but their attempts have failed.

As a second-year patient I have been promoted in the hierarchy of the springs. Last year my sources of supply were Theresien- brunn (41° R), Marktbrunn (39°) and Mühlbrunn (43.6°), while I only took a glass of Sprudel twice. This year, from the second week on, they have been Felsenquelle (one glass a day) (45° R), Bernardsbrunn (53.8°) (two glasses) and Sprudel (two glasses) 59°-60° R, making five glasses of hot every morning, on top of which come one cold Schlossbrunn on rising and one at bedtime.

According to Prof. Ferdinand Ragsky's analysis, Sprudel water consists of:

In 16 ounces=7680 g.

Sulphate of potash
1.2564
Sulphate of soda
18.2160
Chloride of sodium
7.9156
Carbonate of soda
10.4593
Carbonate of lime
2.2870
Carbonate of magnesia
0.9523
Carbonate of strontium
0.0061
Carbonate of ferric oxide
0.0215
Carbonate of manganic oxide
0.0046
Phosphate of clay
0.0030
Phosphate of lime
0.0015
Fluoride of potassium
0.0276
Silica
0.5590
Total of fixed constituents
41.7099
Free and uncombined carbonic acid
5.8670

Among the fellows calling for the celebration of Sedan Day[4]

here was a businessman from Barmen, Gustav Köttgen—might he be connected with the old fool[5] ?

You had better watch out: Karl Grün is competing with you. He is bringing out a work on natural philosophy next spring and has already given a foretaste of it in the Berlin Wage which Weiss has sent me from Berlin.[6]

I shall be leaving here on Saturday,[7] initially for Prague, having got a letter from there today from Oppenheim.[8] From Prague I shall proceed via Frankfurt.

Dr Fleckles has just arrived and is taking me out for a meal. So my long letter has come to naught; moreover Dr Fleckles says it is unsuited to the cure. Kindest regards to Madame Lizzy.

Your

Moor

  1. ↑ Marx's letters from Karlsbad to his daughter Eleanor (Tussy) have not been found.
  2. ↑ 'Heil' in the original, meaning 'salvation' and 'treatment'.
  3. ↑ Here: that doctors were in attendance.
  4. ↑ The reference is to the battle of 1 September 1870 during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, in which the French army was smashed. The crushing defeat at Sedan speeded up the collapse of the Second Empire and led to the proclamation of a republic in France on 4 September 1870.
  5. ↑ On Marx's and Engels' attitude to the German socialist Gustav Adolph Köttgen, see their 'Letter from the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee to G. A. Köttgen' (present edition. Vol. 6, pp. 54-56).
  6. ↑ The introduction to Grün's book was published under the heading 'Ueber Weltanschauungen. Präludium zur Philosophie in der Gegenwart' in Die Wage, Nos. 33-38, 20 August-17 September 1875. The book itself was completed in March 1876 and issued by Otto Wiegand's publishing house (K. Grün, Die Philosophie in der Gegenwart. Realismus und Idealismus, Leipzig, 1876). In May 1873, Engels had made a start on one of his principal works, Dialectics of Nature.
  7. ↑ 11 September
  8. ↑ See next letter.