THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 201 



have leisure to digest." Avoid after-dinner work ; break through every 

 rule of conventional customs, and postpone the principal meal to the end 

 of the day, rather than let the marasmus of the digestive organs reach 

 a degree that calls for a change of climate and occupation, as the only 

 alternative of a total collapse. Open your bedroom-windows, take a 

 liberal dose of fresh spring-water with the last meal, and an air-bath 

 before going to bed, and the result will convince you that night is not 

 an unpropitious time for digestion. 



Unlike constipation, diaiThoea, even in its transient phases, is 

 always a morbid symptom, and a proof that either the quality or the 

 excessive quantity of the ingested food calls for abnormal means of 

 evacuation. For the incipient stages of the disorder the great specific 

 is fasting. Denutrition, or. the temporary deprivation of food, exer- 

 cises an astringent influence, as part of its general conservative effect. 

 The organism, stinted in the supply of its vital resources, soon begins 

 to curtail its current expenditure. The movements of the respiratory 

 process decrease ; the temperature of the body sinks, the secretion of 

 bile and uric acid is diminished, and before long the retrenchments of 

 the assimilative process react on the functions of the intestinal organs ; 

 the colon contracts, and the smaller intestines retain all but the most 

 irritating ingesta.* 



When that remedy fails, the presumption is that either some viru- 

 lent substance resists the eliminative efforts of Nature, or else that, in 

 spite of the diminished sources of supply, the accumulated alimentary 

 material still exceeds the needs of the organism. In the latter case, 

 unless a continuation of the fast should seem preferable, the waste can 

 be stopped by active exercise. After a hard day's work a man can 

 assimilate a quantum of food that would afflict an idler with grievous 

 crapulence. The Kamtchatka savage has earned the right to digest the 

 flesh of the brute which he has slain in a rough-and-tumble combat. 

 The stomach of the negro does not reject the fruit which he has 

 plucked from the top branches of a tall forest-tree. Loose bowels be- 

 come retentive if Epicurus has chopped his own wood and fetched his 

 own cooking-water. But the best of all astringent exercises is a pe- 

 destrian excursion. A liberal supply of green fruit has a laxative tend- 

 ency. A campaign in an orchard country costs the invaders a good 

 deal of laudanum ; in midsummer some forty per cent of the rank and 

 file are generally on the sick-list with diarrhoea. But the first forced 

 march stops such symptoms. Laxatives and pedestrianism are what 

 lecturers on materia medica call "incompatibles." By a combination 

 of foot-journeys and abstinence even a malignant case of chronic diar- 



♦ A persistent hunger-cure will eliminate even an active virus by a pjradual molecular 

 catalysis and displacement of the inorganic elements. The Arabs cure syphilis by quar- 

 antines d la Tanner ; and Dr. C. E. Page mentions the case of a far-gone consumptive 

 who starved the tubercles out of his system. Aneurisms (internal tumors) have been 

 cured by similar means. 



