Says Dr. Hunter:

"It is an old and a cruel experiment, that of the French academicians, who fed dogs on washed flesh-meat until they died of starvation. The poor animals soon became aware that it was not food, and refused to eat it.

Were our instincts as natural, no charming of the eyes or tickling of the palate by our cook would persuade us to swallow those washed and whitened foods that deceive us into weakness.

"a.n.a.lysis of the liver and other important vital organs after death, show that in some diseased states these organs contain only one-half of certain saline matters that are invariable in the healthy organ. And not only so, but that in proportion to this deficiency the organ is useless for its work. In fact, as the organ changed its tissue (as does every part of the body every three or four years), and was compelled to renew itself in the absence of sufficient potash and phosphates, it did its best to preserve its form and structure much as a fossil does. It rebuilt itself as best it could of such material as would make tissue with the minimum of potash; but such tissue, whilst useful and conservative in retaining the form, elasticity and contractility of the organ, is as useless for secretion and excretion as a fossil liver."

The want of knowledge, not only on the part of the laity, but medical men as well, regarding such questions, and health matters in general, is exhibited in the utterances heard on every hand: "The doctor says the trouble is with my liver," explains one who hasn't a sound tissue in his entire body. "My blood is bad--so the doctor says."[59] "'He' gave me something for my blood"--or my appet.i.te, or my kidneys as the case may be--it might as well be "_for my grandmother_." "The first thing to be done," says an eminent physician, after citing an hypothetical case, "is to clear out the liver"; and then, after apologizing for "what might seem to be an unscientific expression," he continues: "I have already explained the way in which certain purgatives may be said to have the effect of clearing out the liver, and first among these we must reckon _mercurials_." The italics are my own. He then offers a generous dose of blue-pill "every night, or two or three grains of calomel either alone or combined with extract of hyoscyamos or conium, and this," he continues, "should be followed next morning by a saline draught." Mercury, to poison and exasperate the entire organism, and then a saline potion in the hope of getting rid of the mercury! And then he offers a grain of sense--a h.o.m.opathic dose, indeed, but drowned in a deluge of something vastly worse than sugar and water: "But even with all this care in food and drink, with all this attention to what is to be taken and what avoided, how are we to keep the liver in order _without exercise_?" Again, the underlining is the author's. How, indeed, without attention to all the simple laws of life--"so simple," says Schopenhauer, "that we refuse to understand them!"

[Footnote 59: Strangely enough the belief prevails, generally, that the blood is a fixed quant.i.ty; whereas, in fact, it is constantly changing, second by second, used up and cast out, and replaced from the food; so that if one's blood is impure to-day, he may at once begin to make a better article, by making it of better material,--not by "tinkering it up"

with drugs or so-called "blood-purifiers."]

Dr. Hunter continues:

"Not only the liver, but the kidney, spleen, and brain, and the small blood-vessels in every part of the body share in this degeneration of tissue; and strangely enough (and not unlike the French experiment), this amyloid, waxy, or lardaceous tissue is indigestible by the gastric juice.

It is _washed flesh_ made inside the body, and is good for nothing either dead or alive.

"The washed flesh fed to those poor dogs contained abundance of nitrogen and carbon; but these alone, as Liebig remarked, were as useless as stones in the absence of saline matters--_not of common salt, be it remembered, for that is found in excess in the fossil organs mentioned_. The essential salines that can be readily washed out of food are chiefly two--potash salts and alkaline phosphates. These are also the two that are found deficient, about 50 per cent. in the waxy form of degenerated tissue. This is the type most common in atrophied children, and in persons suffering from consumption[60] and other wasting diseases; but it is not uncommon in the capillaries and small arteries of many who _seem_ in health.

[Footnote 60: See chapters on "Consumption."]

"When vegetables are soaked in cold water to keep them fresh, when they are blanched in hot water to please our eye, or when they are well boiled and their essence drained off that we may eat the depleted residue, those soluble salines are almost entirely extracted. And what are left? Chiefly the less soluble salts of lime and magnesia--just those elements so abundant in the cretaceous degeneration of blood-vessels.

"Potash is the alkaline element of formed tissue; its absence is one great cause of scurvy, as well as of the waxy and perhaps the cretaceous types of degeneration.[61] A little examination of our modern commoner foods will show how deficient they are in this element.

[Footnote 61: See chapter on "Bright's Disease."]

"Bread was, I suppose, at one time, the 'staff of life,' but it could hardly have been white bread. Of it, one pound contains about seven grains of potash, or nearly twenty grains less than a pound of brown bread.

Potatoes, if peeled, steeped and boiled in plenty of water, contain only about twenty-one grains in the pound, as against thirty-seven if boiled in their skins. The skins surpa.s.s the center about four-fold in salines.

Cabbages and all leafy vegetables lose much more, as the water gets right through every portion of them.

"Arrowroot, cornflour, and most of those prepared foods are more deceitful than the washed flesh of the French academicians. Stewed fruits, as made by some cooks, are also guilty of the wash. Even porridge, haricot beans, pease, etc., are by some cooks soaked when raw (this water being thrown away), and thus much depleted." After simple washing, all vegetables, including beans and pease, if soaked at all, should be boiled in the water in which they are soaked; and, finally, the water from which the cooked vegetables are withdrawn, should be used as "soup stock" thickened with bread, rice, or sliced vegetables, and seasoned with meat, if meat is used at all. Containing as it does a large percentage of the salts from the vegetables, this water supplies the necessary "seasoning" far better than artificial salt. Turnips, instead of being sliced before boiling, should be boiled whole. Onions are every way better boiled before peeling. At first, the taste, accustomed to the flavor (!) of depleted vegetables,--or rather to the condiments with which they are prepared, has to be educated to the real flavor of _whole_ food. And, again, such food being more nutritious, less in amount must be eaten, upon pain of indigestion. "No wonder if this generation finds itself degenerating. Like a ship built of rotten timber, a man fed on depleted food goes all very well in good weather and with a light load; but when one can neither bear an average load, nor undergo unusual fatigue, let him cross-question his cook."[62]

[Footnote 62: Charles D. Hunter, M.D., F.C.S., in _Herald of Health_.]

The truth is that, to a very great degree, we build our bodies out of blood made from impure materials: (1) in part from food depleted by cooking or improper cooking, (2) in part from substances which, as all are agreed, can be "indulged in" only to a limited extent (who can define the limit?), (3) in great measure, from fermented, instead of well-digested food;--and having thus built up "fossil" bodies (still more fossilized by the use of unnatural drinks which "prevent the waste of tissue"), there must be sickness. There is no escape from it, except by a "right about face." The zymotic, and the various acute diseases, so called, are in point of fact acute _remedies_ for chronic _disease_.

CHAPTER XII.

WHEAT-MEAL VS. "ENTIRE FLOUR."

Without doubt, certain brands of "whole-wheat flour," so called, are a great improvement over the article in universal demand among poor and rich alike, the white flour of commerce, in this: they are, when made by honest manufacturers, less impoverished than the white flours. In public and in private, I have advised their use instead of white flour, but solely upon the ground that the wheat is _less_ robbed of certain of its invaluable const.i.tuents in the former; but I can not conceive it possible to separate the hull from the kernel without real loss, even if the hull were, in itself, objectionable, which, so far from being true, is, in my opinion, a mistake and a very serious one. The theory upon which the objection to the outside coat of the grain rests, is that this coat is composed of woody fiber, entirely indigestible and devoid of nutritive matters, and, worst of all, say these honest objectors, the hulls are coa.r.s.e, sharp-edged, and irritating to the stomach and intestines, and therefore injurious in their action, especially in the case of "sensitive and delicately organized individuals." I will not stop to discuss the question as to the propriety of the phrase _sensitive and delicately organized_, as applied to the cla.s.s of poor, suffering wretches who by reason of their gross habits--and I mean simply the dietetic habits of the people, not the mechanic, the artisan, the small trader, nor yet the factory hand, nor the wretched poor, but the _human race_, from the kings, queens, and presidents all along the line--who by reason, I repeat, of the universal system of diet, have become dyspeptic. I can not, however, forbear the remark, that the most sensitive and delicately organized individuals, among the most n.o.ble of all animals next to man,--and in some aspects far superior to him,--the horse, in his finest and most delicate state, finds a perfect food in the whole grain, chewing it himself. I may be, in the minds of some, weakening my argument by comparing the digestive apparatus of man with that of the horse, but I am desirous of impressing upon the minds of my readers the well-known but imperfectly considered fact, that our horse-fanciers,--who dote on their hundred-thousand-dollar animals, and who would place before them the most costly and complicated dishes, certainly would feed them on the finest and whitest of flour,--"Imperial Granum" even, at drug-store prices, if it were desirable, or even not pernicious in a health point of view,--really keep their dearest pets on _bread and water_; and that, because of this, and the absence of all the hot, stimulating articles, solid or fluid, indulged in by their owners, and their regular and moderate diet of _uncooked_ food, and their superior hygiene in certain essential matters, our thorough-bred horses are generally saved from becoming fat, sick, mean, wheezy, or dyspeptic, like their masters and mistresses, men, women, and children.

We know that the microscope shows up the ragged edges of the hulls and gives them a fearful aspect; but if the microscope could reason, and if it was given to arguing all questions submitted to it, I fancy it would speedily silence these objections to wheat-meal, so far as they rest upon the matter of the coa.r.s.eness and the irritating capacity of the hull, by asking the microscopist to take a little glance at the stomach itself: an internal view of the digestive tract would disclose the fact that, even in the case of the most "sensitive and finely organized" subject, the lining of the stomach, for example, bears a stronger resemblance to a _quartz mill_ than do these terrible hulls to sticks and stones. The trouble has been with those who seek to improve too much over Nature's methods, and especially is this the case in the question under discussion, they have reasoned mainly from one side of the question. Machinery has accomplished no end of good things, and without doubt has even greater victories yet in store, in its legitimate field; but that field is not in the line of improving on the food that Nature provides for us humans. It can and does improve over the old methods of sowing, reaping, threshing, and cleansing the various grains--no one desires to dispute this; but when the ripe, clean kernel of wheat, for instance, is placed before us, the office of machinery is ended, except so far as crushing the grain for those whose teeth or temper will not admit of chewing it. A shrewd though illiterate stable keeper said to me, in advocating whole, instead of cracked corn for horses and cattle, "it gets the juice of their teeth, and does them twice as much good. Give them meal, or cracked corn, and they don't have to chew it long enough to get the right action of the saliva."

People who neglect the most obvious hygienic rules, thereby bringing upon themselves sickness and pain, and search for special articles of diet that may seem to promise relief, remind me of a junk-dealer who would pa.s.s by old stoves, pots, kettles, and crowbars, and search for a needle in a hay-stack! The theory of the anti-wheat-meal men seems plausible at first sight, and it has been held, temporarily, by some very sound men; but one after another these have dropped it as untenable. To be sure, the ranks are kept full by new recruits, who join faster than the _thinkers_ fall out. There are a thousand dyspeptics for every discerning man, and, in any event, all such--all persons, in fact, are to be congratulated when they adopt a compromise in the shape of fine flour which claims to give them all the essential elements of the wheat, and yet save their "delicate" and sensitive stomachs needless labor and irritation. But I find that the cla.s.s who are _saving lives_ constantly, hold to the entire meal as the only means of securing perfect bread--the staff of life.

Says Oswald: "We can not breathe pure oxygen. For a.n.a.logous reasons bran flour [whole meal] makes better bread than bolted flour; meat and saccharine fruits are healthier than meat extracts and pure glucose. In short, artificial extracts and compounds are, on the whole, less wholesome than the palatable products of nature. In the case of bran-flour and certain fruits with a large percentage of wholly innutritious matter, chemistry fails to account for this fact, but biology suggests the mediate cause: the normal type of our physical const.i.tution dates from a period when the digestive organs of our (frugivorous) ancestors adapted themselves to such food--a period compared with whose duration the age of grist-mills and made dishes is but of yesterday."

This doctoring of the cereals can never prove of service in the end, except to the manufacturers and dealers; these "preparations," however honestly made, and supposing for argument's sake that the machinery accomplishes what the manufacturers intend, will never, in and of themselves,--_i. e._, except so far as they take the place of _white flour_--prove beneficial to mankind, and least of all to sick people, valetudinarians, and the sedentary cla.s.ses,--the very ones who need the best. Imagine a constipated dyspeptic, with a heavy fur coat on his tongue, and, of course, a heavier one on the lining of his stomach--his entire alimentary ca.n.a.l so covered with this morbid growth that digestion and absorption are well-nigh prohibited--alarmed lest the microscopic particles of wheat-hulls should injure his delicate and sensitive inwards!

"Delicate!" "sensitive!" why, it takes half a cupful of salts to move them, and that but faintly, while a pint of strong coffee makes no impression; when if they were even normally sensitive a tablespoonful of the former, or a single cup of the latter, would purge them violently.

Sensitive! they are _dead_, or at least dying. Why, for this cla.s.s of patients, I would sooner _add the straw_ than remove the hull, as better calculated, by all odds, to meet the necessities of their condition. On the other hand, when the disease a.s.sumes the opposite form--when the tongue is raw, and the intestinal tract acutely inflamed, and from any cause preternaturally sensitive--there is but one thing in the Materia Medica of Nature that is absolutely fit to swallow, and that is _pure water_. (See Chronic Dyspepsia.) It matters not what else is comforting, temporarily,--medicine, gruel, beef-tea, milk, or what not,--the comfort and advantage are derived solely from the water, which const.i.tutes three-fourths to nine-tenths of the whole; the other elements being injurious, and, often enough, fatal, preventing as they do the healing of the inflamed mucous membrane.

CHAPTER XIII.

FRUIT.

It is with difficulty that one who comprehends the question can restrain his impatience when people talk about the danger of indulging in fruit in summer or at any other season. "Better leave an order on the doctor's slate," says the would-be wit, when his friend pa.s.ses with a watermelon or some early apples or peaches. As spring and summer come along, fruit is altogether natural, even if it does come from a little further South. That is one of the advantages of having railroads. These unwise people who dare not eat fruit, or eat it sparingly, while they stick to their winter diet of meat, grease, pastry, coffee, etc., are the ones who have the cholera morbus and other equally ridiculous things. It sometimes happens that these good people have had a "scare" in this fashion: one eats an excessive meal of fat and lean meats, old vegetables, with _plenty of gravy_, etc., all hot and heating, and calculated to create a febrile condition of the system, and insure an "attack" of indigestion. He has also eaten a piece of watermelon or other fruit--the only pure, natural substance appropriate for the time he has swallowed for the day. If, under these circ.u.mstances, he is routed at midnight, he declares he will never eat another piece of melon as long as he lives! It may be that the fruit, if he ate liberally of it, was the exciting cause of the _clearing out_ that otherwise might not have taken place just then; if so, he should congratulate himself that he has been saved a later attack that might have cost him his life. Had he eaten double the quant.i.ty of fruit on an _empty stomach_, providing his system was in decent condition, there would have been no startling consequences. The stomach which refuses to accept raw fruit, or with which it does not "agree," is like that of the drunkard which rebels against pure water. When anyone has become diseased to that degree the sooner he begins to reform his habits the better. In 1863 I was captured by the Confederates and marched out of Brazier City, La., and taken to Shreveport. When captured, I had diarrha--the result of a flesh-food diet, wine, and all the "good things of life." The disease became chronic, and I was near dying. The melon season was on (it was in July), and in sheer desperation, ignorant of the benefits to result from it, rather expecting disaster, I ate freely of watermelon. For eight or ten days I took no other food or drink, but with this I filled myself twice a day, and a return to perfect health was the result; all trace of bowel trouble had disappeared. I have since had many opportunities for observing the benefit arising from the use of watermelon and _nothing else_, in diarrha, upon various persons, young and old, and I have never observed any harmful results from its use; though it is often made the scapegoat, as indicated above.

In a certain little borough in a neighboring State there was little or no fruit, not even apples, to any amount. There was a great deal of sickness every summer--diarrha, dysentery, fevers, etc. One enterprising resident planted an orchard--a generous one in size--and its owner was generous also. He didn't watch the neighbors' children very closely--not as closely as he did his own--and true to boys' instincts they hooked apples, green apples, little bits of apples, hard and sour, and they ate them freely.

The children of the owner of that orchard did not eat green apples, for their father, although believing in fruit, thought it must be ripe to be "healthy." His children had the regularly recurring summer complaints, but the little apple-stealers did not. Without doubt fruit is more truly wholesome ripe than green; and I would here remark, that the craving for vegetable acids which these boys had, and which most children experience, would not be felt if they were properly fed at home. Still, one may eat too much even of fruit: "gold in the morning, silver at noon, and lead at night," might better be changed to diamonds, gold, and silver; and but for other considerations, unappreciated by those who fancy that it is "heavy"

at eve, there would be a restriction in almost anything at the last meal sooner than in fruit. Careful observers have remarked that fruit is a prophylactic, and is also curative, taken on an empty stomach, but is likely to promote indigestion if added to a hearty meal of mixed food.[63] This is one way of saying: after having already over-eaten, or having eaten enough, eat nothing more. Surely any kind of fruit added would be less injurious than to swallow another plate of the soup, fish, or meat. The old Roman gluttons used to take an emetic after dinner; and in this country it has been the custom in times past with some, and it is not altogether obsolete even now, to take a "dinner-pill" before or after the princ.i.p.al meal. The morning draught of "seltzer" or other laxative, so common at the present day, serves the same purpose; and those people who, after obstinate constipation, feel comparatively happy over a violent purging from some form of artificial physic, are the ones who warn against using much fruit, because, upon some occasion, it may have performed a similar service, though without any of the injurious effects of the drugs.

In warm weather the diet may well consist largely of fruit and succulent vegetables. Scrofulous children, especially, might live solely on fruit for days together, with great advantage. Such children should live in the open air as much as possible, and their sleeping-rooms should have the most thorough ventilation. If their noses and ears run in consequence of "exposure," never forget that these poisonous matters are better out than in, and that whatever aids in their elimination is curative. A simpler and purer diet will prevent the formation of catarrhal or scrofulous matters.

Any degree of restriction in the matter of air and exercise can only be counteracted by a corresponding restriction in diet; but a generous allowance of all three is the safest rule. Sedentary persons, loiterers at the mountains or by the sea, can not easily make the proportion of fruit too large, even if during a torrid wave they eat little else. It should be taken at the regular meal hour only, to insure the greatest degree of health and comfort, should be thoroughly masticated, and the quant.i.ty may be just short of causing pressure at the kidneys, or flatulency, yet enough to prevent thirst. Three meals might then be indulged in with safety. The heavy dishes--meats, gravies, greasy articles, hot condiments, pastry, hot stimulating drinks--things that even in winter, in this climate, are only tolerated, and that but poorly, are deadly now, as the mortality reports, and lists of those who are said to have succ.u.mbed to the heat, attest. Moreover, for every one who pays the penalty with his life, tens of thousands are lying or sitting about, suffering the tortures of the d.a.m.ned, often; and all for a few minutes extra palate-tickling, or unnatural indulgences, rather,--for, leaving out the really unseasonable articles and condiments, they might revel in ripe fruits with comparative impunity. He is a poor student in dietetics, a thoughtless observer, even, who can not so regulate his eating as to regard summer as the most agreeable season of the year,--the most comfortable,--who can not bid defiance to the heated term and laugh at the danger of "sunstroke" though running a foot-race under the noonday sun. Calorific food, superadded to the predisposition already existing, is the real source of these strokes in every instance, the external heat furnishing, to be sure, the "last straw."

[Footnote 63: As before intimated, only the stomach disordered and enervated from the use of hot and stimulating kinds of solid and liquid food, spices and condiments, refuses to "agree" with pure, ripe fruits.

Such a stomach requires a fast day, followed by the plainest and most abstemious diet, with a gradually increasing proportion of fruit as the stomach recovers "tone." In all cases fruit requires to be thoroughly masticated, and reduced as nearly as possible to a fluid state before being swallowed.]

CHAPTER XIV.

THE ONE-MEAL SYSTEM.

In this note I propose to do little more than record a few instances, out of many, of persons who have lived for longer or shorter periods, and continue to live, on one meal a day, and let my readers draw their own inferences, merely remarking that these cases have a very great significance as bearing upon the question of the _quant.i.ty of food_ best suited to nourish the body and promote health. Dr. Abernethy, a celebrated English physician, affirmed that "one-fourth of all a man eats sustains him; the balance he retains at his risk"; but his countrymen eat four meals, at least.

The case of Mrs. Solberg, an emaciated dyspeptic, whose restoration to health was accomplished by the one-meal vegetarian diet and "a change of air" (at home), is mentioned in the chapter on Malaria.

S. N. Silver,[64] of Auburn, Me., a hard-working mechanic, has, for upwards of three years, lived on the one-meal-a-day plan. He eats at night, after resting sufficiently from his day's work. He never eats more than seven meals per week, not even so much as an apple between meals; and on Sundays, unless he takes considerable exercise, his "meal" consists of fruit only--three or four apples, for example. He is a typically healthy young man, and has not in three years experienced a moment of physical inconvenience. He is a vegetarian, and lives wholly on simple, pure food, chiefly bread and fruit.

[Footnote 64: Mr. Silver is 30 years old and is 6 feet, 2 inches in height. On the three-meal system his greatest weight was 137 pounds. For two years past, on the new plan, he has weighed from 150 to 160 pounds, according to his work. When he works hard he eats more, and gains in weight; when his work is light he eats light and his weight falls off correspondingly. This ill.u.s.trates a truly physiological diet. It should always be thus with man and the domestic animals alike. In practice, however, the reverse is the rule: the weight increases during leisure and decreases when hard work is done. Both our athletes and race-horses are permitted to fatten between times, and are fitted for sharp work by reducing their weight by exercise. In other words, they are allowed to become diseased, and then they are "cured." This process is apt to result, finally, in premature death, or at least so exhausts the vital forces as to render former accomplishments impossible, at an age when the individual should be in his prime.]

Mrs. Wieman, a sister of the above, has, for upwards of a year, taken but one meal a day, although she prepares three hot meals for her husband and several boarders. She does the entire household work for her family, which during the past summer consisted of nine adults. Her one meal (taken at noon because the regular dinner is at that hour and furnishes a better variety) is no more in amount than her dinner formerly, when she took breakfast and supper in addition. She is a perfect specimen of robust health, and finds that she can now perform with ease an amount of labor which formerly would have been a severe tax, even if possible to accomplish. Her diet is mainly vegetarian; she eats but little meat, and that only because it is constantly before her; and she avoids white flour and most forms of pastry altogether, as well as hot stimulating drinks, condiments, spices, etc., although her table is bountifully supplied with all such things.

Still another of this family, a busy milliner, has lived in this manner for several months, and finds herself improved in health by the means.

Aside from the immense amount of knowledge gained through vivisection--through dead animals, I may say--the _lives_ of the lower animals teach us what to do, in some respects, as well as what to avoid.

Alas, for humanity--claiming such superiority--in both cla.s.ses there are important lessons which are not generally learned and practiced. As bearing upon the one-meal system, I will let Capt. B., an old hunter, tell his experience with his fox-hound: "The old fellow," said the Captain, "knows when I am going on a tramp as well as my wife does--when I turn out for a hunt, in the morning--and he won't touch a mouthful of food.[65] I used to try and 'fool' him, by acting as if I wasn't going out at all, and sometimes I could get him to eat breakfast. But I never try that game now, for I noticed, after a while, that when he fixed himself, he did better work than when I managed to get a breakfast into him." "How so?" I asked.

"Why, he is a better dog; he runs better, scents better, barks better, and comes in at night in better shape. And then, if we walk home, he gets pretty well rested and has his 'breakfast' before a great while; or, if we ride, he has it as soon as we get home; and (if it is cold weather) I let him lie in the sitting-room an hour or two after he eats, and then he will go to his kennel and sleep all night, and _without trembling_; and he turns out next morning in good shape for another tramp, if called on." "Do you 'fix' yourself in the same manner?" I could but ask. "Not _much_," he replied; "I eat before I start, and take a lunch along; but I don't know but the old dog has the best of it, after all." As a matter of fact, the aged dog is like a sprightly youth still, while his master, at middle-age, is a decrepit old man.