MEALS. 459 
The famous Dr. Johnson seems, according to Leslie Stephen, 
to have “eaten like a wolf,—savagely, silently, and with undis- 
criminating fury.” He was not a pleasant object during the 
performance ; he became totally absorbed in the business of 
the moment; a strong perspiration broke out, and the veins 
of his forehead swelled. He liked coarse. satisfying dishes,— 
boiled pork, and veal pie, stuffed with plums, and sugar; whilst 
in regard to wine he seems to have accepted the doctrines of the 
critic of a certain fluid (professedly “‘ Port’) who asked, “ What 
more can you want? It is black, it is thick, and it makes you 
drunk.” Moreover, he would pour oyster sauce over his plum- 
pudding. Sydney Smith, remonstrating with Sir George Phillips 
by letter (1829), wrote: “‘ And now, Sir George, let me caution 
you against indulgence in that enormous appetite of yours ; 
you eat every day as much as four men in holy orders, and yourself 
a layman!” 
There seems to be without doubt an evident relation between 
the increased consumption of meat as food, and the frequent 
occurrence of appendicitis (or obstruction of the little worm-like 
process attached where the small intestines terminate in the 
first pouch—cecum—of the large bowels), which has recently 
taken to prevail so commonly. Plain meals, and fasts, have 
become almost completely banished from amongst us; and in 
towns where this appendicitis has grown more frequent of late, 
flesh food is now the chief nutriment. “I have seen,” says 
Dr. Keen, “lately a number of cases of appendicitis among 
young subjects, who had been reared on animal food, at a period 
when the nourishment ought to have consisted exclusively in 
a milk diet.”” Among the large cities of the United States of 
America, appendicitis obtains so widely that it is estimated 
one-third of the population is attacked by this trouble. In the 
majority of cases it would appear that the small tube of the 
appendix is invaded by a particular microbe, the Bacillus coli 
communis. Modern teaching says that this appendix is more 
than an obsolete rudimentary structure, and has its uses by 
pouring a secretion into the large bowel for promoting the diges- 
tion of food therein. Carnivoreus animals do not possess a 
cecum, but among herbivorous animals the organ is very large. 
Generally when obstructive appendicitis is threatened, a 
thorough washing-out of the breeding bed of the offending 
microbe in the cecum, and appendix, by a copious injection of 
