276 A WORD OR TWO TOUCHING EVERY MAN^S MASTER. 



vious knowledge of chemistry necessary to the process of nutrition 

 which is too absurd to need refutation. 



All books written expressly for the public, and professing to convey 

 useful information, should, as much as possible, be free from profes- 

 sional technicality; for no explanation, however simple, can carry 

 conviction to minds not previously prepared for the comprehension 

 of such subjects, by an elementary education. Convinced of this, 

 which does not require much reflection, the reader takes up with 

 that good faith which is indispensable between patient and physician, 

 and without which the most effectual remedies often fail a work on 

 dietetics, the result perhaps of years of close study and observation, 

 calculating that, if it were possible to arrive at a correct conclusion, 

 the man who has devoted the energies of his mind and body for years 

 to it, is the most likely person to effect it. In this he is right, but 

 when he comes to the application of this reasoning, and reads the 

 long preliminary dissertations which the man of medicine, with all 

 the gravity, and not a little of the cant of the profession, assures his 

 gentle reader is necessary to comprehend dietetical regimen in all its 

 bearings, his faith begins to fail him, and the book is thrown down 

 in disgust. Too often the physician endures the imputation of an 

 advertising quack ; not content with giving the result of his experi- 

 ments and observations, he thinks it also necessary to state the several 

 processes of his investigation with the anatomical and physiological 

 history of the parts concerned. Perhaps the variety of professional 

 erudition is not a little prominent, and the " scire tuum nihil est, nisi 

 se scire hoc sciat alter," is here applicable. To professional men, it 

 may be satisfactory to explain the processes of physiological experi- 

 ments, but to the unmedical man it possesses no interest j he reads 

 the book with the same implicit confidence that he takes his physi- 

 cian's prescription, content to wait its operation without inquiring 

 the modus operandi. After wading through a mass of unintelligible 

 matter, to his great astonishment, like the man in Moliere, who, 

 without knowing it, was speaking prose for forty years of his life, 

 he finds, that notwithstanding the vigour of his body and firmness of 

 his muscle, he has been living for thirty or forty years of his life 

 upon what the dietetical physicians have condemned as innutritious 

 and unwholesome. Now, men who profess new doctrines, and expect 

 a fair share of public confidence, should be men, not only of great 

 public veracity, but men capable, in every respect, of investigating 

 the operations of nature with the eye of a philosopher, and the zeal 

 of a philanthropist ; and if we consider how few of the book-making 

 men of the present day can be ranked in this class, we should receive, 

 with considerable latitude, their bold and sweeping anathemas. 



Every article of diet, solid or fluid, derived from the animal, vege- 

 table, or inorganic world, has been tortured in the crucible of the 

 chemist, who, like the philosopher eliciting sunbeams from cowslips, 

 establishes their claim to precedence on his list of nutritious articles, 

 in proportion as they correspond to his chemical notions. It does 

 not require much argument to show that dietetics, based on such 

 principles, must ever be a fruitful source of disappointment to the 

 physician, and disease to the patient. To establish dietetics on prin- 



