OP FOOD AND HUNGER. 215 



During his life he always was offensive, hot, and in a sweat, 

 especially at intervals. His breath rolled off like steam, and 

 dejections were constantly most copious and intolerably foetid. 

 He was of the middle height, thin, and weak. 



All the abdominal viscera were found full of suppurations. 



His stomach was of immense size, and this has usually been 

 the case in persons habitually gluttonous. A polyphagous idiot 

 opened by the same writers displayed an enormous stomach, 

 more resembling that of a horse than of a human being : the 

 intestines also formed several large pouches in succession, which 

 appeared like additional stomachs. Cabrol dissected a glutton 

 of Toulouse, and found the oesophagus terminating in an exces- 

 sively large cavity and the intestines running, without a single 

 convolution, but with merely a gentle sygmoid flexure, to the 

 anus. We thus learn the common cause of constitutional vora- 

 ciousness and obtain an additional reason for referring hunger to 

 the want of distention of the stomach : — a great bulk of food 

 was required to^Z these stomachs. If hunger were independent 

 of the distention of this organ, and connected solely with the 

 want of the system, an ordinary meal would have always sufficed, 

 as the extraordinary quantity of food could not be demanded 

 for nourishment, — when food enough for support had been 

 taken, hunger should have ceased. But hunger continued till 

 the stomach was filled, and the prodigious collection was dig- 

 posed of by abundant stools, sweating, and copious pulmonary 

 exhalation. 



The large capacity of the stomach is generally ascribable to 

 original conformation, but some account for it occasionally by 

 repeated over- distention and the deglutition of indigestible sub- 

 stances, — an opinion rather improbable when we reflect that 

 city gluttons, who give a very fair trial to the distensibility of 

 their idol, never acquire such appetites and capaciousness of sto- 

 mach as qualify them for a show. The power of deglutition 

 may be very much increased by practice. We have all seen the 

 Indian jugglers, and I frequently conversed with a poor man who 



