582 MEALS MEDICINAL. 
PRESERVATIVES. 
Respecting Mik when turning sour, and its treatment by 
unscrupulous persons to arrest the sourness artificially, an 
explicit mention has been already made here. The preservatives 
employed for such a purpose, and for other similar ends, are 
salicylic acid, borax, boracic acid. and formalin, these being 
germ-destroyers, but at the same time strong, and mischievous 
drugs. The sulphites, and fluorides are also brought into use 
nowadays for keeping meat, and game, from becoming putrid 
when stale. Borax, and boracic acid, if introduced into the 
human system through milk, meat, game, or fish, tend to liquefy 
the blood, and to act as poisons; furthermore, boric acid will 
cause baldness, besides grievously impairing the digestion. 
Benzoic acid, another of these preservatives, induces gastric 
catarrh ; plants watered with a solution of it wither away. 
In larger doses it will produce vomiting, and acute inflammation 
of the kidneys, which have to eliminate the poison. Physicians 
are inclined at the present time to believe that the widespread, 
and wholesale consumption of this preservative with beer, cider, 
canned goods, etc., is to be held accountable for the increasing 
prevalence of Bright’s disease (albuminuria) in the United States 
of America. All these preservatives, whilst obviating the 
growth of micro-organisms in the food-substances to which 
they are heedlessly added, and so preventing manifest decom- 
position therein, also check the development of wholesome 
digestive ferments, and thus materially lessen the digestibility 
of the foods with which they are served; consumers will do 
well to remember this physiological fact. Whatever drug 
hinders fermentation, whether such drug be antiseptic, or 
disinfectant, it also cripples digestion, which is in itself much 
of a fermentative process. The habitual use of foods containing 
either antiseptics or preservatives of the character just described, 
will invariably result in stomachic, and intestinal derangements. 
Good milk, sweet butter, sound beer, and pure wine can be 
secured without the injurious addition of antiseptics to these 
essential articles of daily nourishment. Nearly all of the said 
modern preservatives are based chemically on methylal, or 
formaldehyde, both of which are useful antiseptics for disinfecting, 
| and of value also for embalming dead human bodies, but not 
_ * desirable for making mummies of living persons. The use of milk 
