208 A HISTORY OF 



Hunger has been supposed by some to arise from the rubbing of the 

 coats of the stomach against each other, without having any inter- 

 vening substance to prevent their painful attrition. Others have 

 imagined that its juices, wanting their necessary supply, turn acrid, or 

 as some say, pungent, and thus fret its internal coats, so as to produce 

 a train of the most uneasy sensations. Boerhaave, who established 

 his reputation in physic by uniting the conjectures of all those that 

 preceded him, ascribes hunger to the united effects of both these 

 causes, and asserts, that the pungency of the gastric juices, and thu 

 attrition of its coats against each other, cause those pains, which no- 

 thing but food can remove. These juices continuing still to be sepa- 

 rated in the stomach, and every moment becoming more acrid, mix 

 with the blood, and infect the circulation ; the circulation being thu. 

 contaminated, becomes weaker, and more contracted ; and the whole 

 nervous frame sympathising, a hectic fever, and sometimes madness, 

 is produced, in which state the faint wretch expires. In this manner, 

 the man who dies of hunger may be said to be poisoned by the juices 

 of his own body, and is destroyed less by the want of nourishment 

 than by the vitiated qualities of that which he had already taken. 



However this may be, we have but few instances of men dying, ex- 

 cept at sea, of absolute hunger. The decline of those unhappy crea- 

 tures who are destitute of food, at land, being more slow and unper- 

 ceived. These, from often being in need, and as often receiving an 

 accidental supply, pass their lives between surfeiting and repining ; 

 and their constitution is impaired by insensible degrees. Man is unfit 

 for a state of precarious expectation. That share of provident pre- 

 caution which incites him to lay up stores for a distant day, becomes 

 his torment, when totally unprovided against an immediate call. The 

 lower race of animals, when satisfied, for the instant moment, are 

 perfectly happy : but it is otherwise with man ; his mind anticipates 

 distress, and feels the pangs of want even before it arrests him. Thus 

 the mind, being continually harassed by the situation, it at length in- 

 fluences the constitution, and unfits it for all its functions. Some cruel 

 disorder, but no way like hunger, seizes the unhappy sufferer ; so that 

 almost all those men who have thus long lived by chance, and whose 

 every day may be considered as a happy escape from famine, are 

 known at last to die in reality, of a disorder caused by hunger, but 

 which, in the common language, is often called a broken heart. Some 

 of these I have known myself, when very little able to relieve them : 

 and I have been told by a very active and worthy magistrate, that 

 the number of such as die in London for want, is much greater than 

 one would imagine I think he talked of two thousand in a year ! 



But how numerous soever those who die of hunger may be, many 

 times -greater, on the other hand, are the number of those who die 

 by repletion. It is not the province of the present page to speculate 

 with the physician upon the danger of surfeits ; or with the moralist, 

 upon the nauseousness of gluttony ; it will only be proper to observe, 

 that as nothing is so prejudicial to health as hunger by constraint, so 

 nothing is more beneficial to the constitution than voluntary absti 

 nence. It was not without reason that religion enjoined this duty ; 

 siuce it answered the double purpose of restoring the health oppressed 



