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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



CORRESPONDENCE. 



A CRITICISM AND A REPLY. 



Messrs. Editors : 



IN the realm of popular science a clear, 

 piquant style is good, to unfold and ad- 

 here strictly to truth is better ; but a union 

 of these is the best of all. No one who has 

 read Dr. Oswald's series of papers on health 

 and disease in this " Monthly " can deny him 

 the first attribute ; but he must be superfi- 

 cial, indeed, who will allow him the second. 

 I do not mean to say that all or even the 

 larger part of his inculcations are false, but 

 only that some of them are so glaringly 

 contrary to fact that the special and culti- 

 vated observer can only tolerate the reading 

 of them by the vigorous excellence of their 

 surroundings. 



It is not my intention to point out all 

 the errors that have appeared in his long 

 series of papers. I shall only refer to a 

 few in his last article (July), entitled " The 

 Remedies of Nature" for dyspepsia a mis- 

 nomer, by-the-way, as the remedies recom- 

 mended are not Nature's, but Dr. Oswald's ; 

 as, for instance, " sleeping in a cross- 

 draught" whatever this may mean, as a bul- 

 wark against dyspepsia. 



On page 307 the doctor asserts that dys- 

 pepsia is not an hereditary complaint. If it is 

 not, then there is no such thing. When con- 

 sumption, cancer, and insanity, are spoken 

 of as hereditary, the meaning is not that 

 either of these diseases exists per se from 

 the moment of conception, only that the 

 tendency to them does. But the tendency 

 to dyspepsia in some families is even more 

 literally hereditary than the diseases named, 

 for every careful and wide-observing physi- 

 cian knows that the offspring of some par- 

 ents, almost from the moment of birth, 

 manifests a facility for indigestion from the 

 most trifling indiscretions. Observant moth- 

 ers know that their own or neighbors' chil- 

 dren, all of like habits and conditions of 

 life, are strikingly unequal in digestive 

 strength. Some of them can not eat this 

 or that without severe suffering, others can 

 eat of every unwholesome viand, and laugh 

 at warnings; and this, not only in child- 

 hood, but more or less all through life. The 

 difference is wholly inexplicable, except on 

 the principle of heredity. 



Our bright and spicy writer tells the 

 dyspeptic " under no circumstances to re- 

 sort to drug-exorcism." Only a person of 

 superficial knowledge, of strong physique, 

 and bigoted withal, who judges all others 

 by his own personal equation, could dis- 

 course thus. Men and women will eat and 

 drink, cither with or without knowledge, 



what they ought not ; as a consequence, the 

 stomach rebels, and intense suffering en- 

 sues. Only a short time since I saw a wom- 

 an who had been writhing every few min- 

 utes with terrible gastric cramps for ten 

 hours. Clearly it was an attack of acute 

 dyspepsia. To the suggestion of an emetic 

 she answered that a vomit nearly killed her, 

 and, besides, nothing could be on her stom- 

 ach, as nothing had been eaten all day. 

 But another paroxysm of cramp led her to 

 exclaim, " Well, anything for relief ! " In a 

 few minutes she threw up nearly a gallon of 

 fermenting food, that filled her chamber 

 with the fumes of a fetid sourness worse 

 than that of an August swill-tub. Half an 

 hour after, she fell into a calm sleep. If 

 humans will eat and drink what they ought 

 not eating, not for need but for pleasure, 

 not as a means but as an end the physi- 

 cian's duty is clearly to relieve suffering by 

 the removal of its immediate cause, as by 

 an emetic or cathartic. Of course, the ho- 

 moeopathic dogma (all dogmas in science 

 are heretical) is to do nothing of the kind ; 

 to wait on Nature, and she will remove all 

 the impurities of the alimentary canal her- 

 self. It is a source of surprise that these 

 idealists, if they wish to be thought consist- 

 ent, should ever use any soap and water to 

 remove the impurities from their skins ; 

 they should wait on Nature, and she will 

 scale the dirt off herself. Certes, skin-foul- 

 ness is as nothing compared to bowel-filth, 

 and a cathartic soap often lifts, as no skin- 

 cleaning does, an oppressive incubus from 

 the presence of organic decomposing mat- 

 ter in the intestines, which is death itself 

 when a little of it finds its way into the 

 blood. A grain of aloin thrown into the 

 blood-current hypodermically will simply act 

 as a purge ; a grain of decaying animal mat- 

 ter similarly used will kill just as surely as 

 a bullet through the lungs. Homoeopaths 

 magnify drug-poisoning five hundred diame- 

 ters ; but when they look for the poisons of 

 diseases they reverse the microscope, seeing 

 nothing at all. 



Our lively doctor argues for fewer meals 

 per day even for the single-meal system 

 as the remedy for dyspepsia (page 312). 

 Vaporific theorizing, without a scintilla of 

 verification, is scarcely worthy of notice. 

 After thirty years' reading and close prac- 

 tical observations, I have yet to learn of a 

 man, not a sensational crank, who seriously 

 proposed, much less gave instances in which 

 it had been successfully employed, as a 

 remedy for dyspepsia. Tens of thousands 

 of practical scientists have tried and found 



