Decembek 10, 1009] 



SCIENCE 



825 



in health and disease, and even more ig- 

 norant of the rise and present stage of 

 development of the science and art of med- 

 icine. Largelj' because of this ignorance 

 he is prone to grotesque opinions and state- 

 ments. Such opinions are not, however, 

 confined to the man on the street. A 

 famous university professor, whose studies 

 lie rather in the sphere of a dead language 

 than of a living science, said recently to a 

 colleague, in explanation of a slight at- 

 tack of faintness, that the fumes of his gall 

 had passed upward into his brain ! The 

 students of the first medical year now be- 

 fore me will soon learn to appreciate the 

 strangene-ss of this physiological concep- 

 tion. 



Most persons are eccentric to a greater 

 or less extent on the subject of diet. Their 

 notions of food, what they can eat and 

 what they can drink, are often derived 

 from a very crude kind of illogical deduc- 

 tion from their experience. To pounce 

 upon a single unhappy food as the cause 

 of an attack of indigestion after a feast, 

 and pledge oneself to abstinence from it in 

 the future, when there might be a score of 

 causes, not only constitutes wilful defiance 

 of the laws of logic, but it is never certain 

 of insuring inununity from a subsequent 

 similar attack of gastric disturbance. No 

 one is free from imagined dietetic peculi- 

 arities, and there are differences only of 

 degree between successive individuals in 

 the dietetic series from the omnivore at 

 one end to the vegetarian, the fruitarian, 

 the nutarian and the raw-food advocate at 

 the other. Of all these extremists perhaps 

 the advocate of raw food is the most mad, 

 for his sober contention is that if food be 

 eaten in the uncooked state, its protopla.sm 

 on entering the body will at once be added, 

 by a sort of accretion process, to the stock 

 of protoplasm of the host ! Such a simple, 

 clear, attractive generalization has but one 



fault, that it fails to take into considera- 

 tion the physiological phenomena of diges- 

 tion, absorption and assimilation. While 

 some persons are thus quarreling as to the 

 kind of food that human beings should eat, 

 others are discussing the quantity of food. 

 There is undoubted soundness in Chitten- 

 den's main conclusion, supported by care- 

 fully conducted experiments, that most 

 persons customarily take too much food, 

 and his influence will undoubtedl.y conduce 

 to ultimate good in inaugurating greater 

 temperance in eating. Probablj' to most 

 persons in the past, where food has been 

 abundant, eating has been in large part a 

 matter of sensuous indulgence. Greater 

 sanity in this respect is surely being inau- 

 gurated, just as it has already been inau- 

 gurated in the matter of drinking alcoholic 

 liquors. 



Diet, however, constitutes but one sphere 

 in which we all have our unreasoning per- 

 sonal hobbies. The character of one's do- 

 mestic remedies for slight physical ills is 

 also an indication of one's mental trend. 

 The soothing syrup, hot drops, composition 

 and catnip tea of our well-intentioned 

 grandmothers, and the various messes, for 

 the most part harmless, which were em- 

 ployed for the annual spring house-clean- 

 ing supposed to be required by the blood, 

 were succeeded by the long list of proprie- 

 tary or "patent" nostrums, many of 

 which, it is now known, owed their popu- 

 larity to their unsuspected content in 

 alcohol; and these in turn are giving way 

 to the more rationally prepared di-ugs of 

 the pharmacopoeia. But some persons like 

 to think that the day of the drug has 

 passed, and the drug-giving doctor is often 

 held up to ridicule. Such persons, and 

 happily they are few, are seemingly ig- 

 norant of the fact that at no time has the 

 science of the drug ever been so exact as 

 now; the physiological actions of drugs 



