The headline therapeutic claim of the Gräfenberg system, as carried by its promoters, was that the cold-water cure relieved or cured a broad span of chronic and acute disease, often in patients the physicians of the day had given up. The support was testimonial: uncontrolled compilations of patient recoveries such as R. T. Claridge’s 1842 treatise, gathered at an establishment whose patients were lodged together and encouraged to recount their cures. No controlled outcome study was ever conducted, and no endpoint was measured. The claim is recorded as unreplicated: it rested on “purely empirical observations” (Skopec, 1991), and the recoveries cannot be attributed to the water cure rather than to the natural course of illness, rest, exercise, abstention from period drugging, or expectation. Scientific hydrotherapy was a later, separate development and did not validate the general-cure claim.