The signature procedure of Kuhne’s system was the friction sitz bath (Sitzreibebad). In his own description in The New Science of Healing, the bather sits in a tub with a footstool, fills it with cold water (about 10 to 14 degrees Celsius) to the level of the seat, and with a coarse linen cloth gently and continuously washes only the external genital region for ten minutes to an hour, no other part of the body touching the water. The stated purpose was to dissolve the accumulated foreign matter and move it toward the bowel, from which it could be excreted, thereby restoring health and (in the Facial Diagnosis chapter heading) “Increasing the Vitality.” No endpoint was measured; the claim is mechanism-only.

The claim is recorded as refuted. It depends entirely on the foreign-matter / self-poisoning premise, which medicine examined and discarded: putrefactive products are not absorbed from the gut in harmful quantity, and the autointoxication theory faded from professional acceptance in the 1920s (Whorton, BMJ 2000). The morbid-matter image is humoral pathology (Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Humour”). Cold-water application to the body produces a real but transient and non-specific circulatory and thermal response; it does not dissolve a material disease-cause or move it toward the bowel, and there is no mechanism by which rubbing the external genitals in cold water expels an internal cause of disease.