46 MEALS MEDICINAL. 
The person who eats in excess, especially of animal food, is 
always too easily fatigued; even a single meal may produce 
fatigue, if it is unusually large, or rich. Workmen are sooner 
tired on a Monday compared with any other day of the week, 
owing to their having more (animal) food, and less work on the 
Sunday preceding. The said fatigue is then due to self-poison- 
ing, or auto-intoxication by corrupt products from a surieited 
digestion. And on this principle it happens that the staying 
power of vegetarian eaters is so much greater than that of those 
who consume meat, when competing, for instance, in walking 
matches over long distances. 
Nevertheless a generous diet in the respect of animal food 
is generally essential towards the cure of hysteria, where 
the nervous system is always impoverished. As regards the 
making, and repair of bodily tissues, these effects can be 
accomplished only by proteids, with mineral matters, and 
water. Besides the lean of flesh these proteids include white 
of egg, the casein of milk, the gluten of grains, and gelatin, 
with fibrin, as parts of meat. They as proteids are alone 
able to fulfil both functions as a food, viz., tissue-making, 
and the maintenance’of bodily warmth. Hence is given to 
them the pre-eminent name, proteids. ‘“‘We may go without 
fats, but unless we have proteids we die.” Vegetable pro- 
teid is not so readily assimilable as that of flesh meat. 
‘Many of the failures of haphazard vegetarianism are due 
to a lack oi sufficient proteids in the diet.” Nitrogen 
enters the body in proteid, and leaves it in urea, the product 
of expended muscular force. Carbon enters the body in fat, 
and leaves it in carbonic dioxide, the product of combustion 
within the body. 
Sir Thomas Browne, in his Religio Medici, 1635, has discoursed 
after the following manner about our eating of meat. “ Now 
for these walls of flesh wherein the soul doth seem to be immured 
before the Resurrection, it is nothing but an elemental com- 
position, and a fabric that must fall to ashes. AU flesh is grass 
is not only metaphorically, but literally true; for all those 
creatures we behold are but the herbs of the field, digested into 
flesh in them, or more remotely carnified in ourselves. Nay, 
further, we are what we all abhor, anthropophagi, and cannibals, 
i: _ devourers not only of men, but of ourselves; and that not in 
an allegory, but a positive truth, for all this mass of flesh which 
