Uric acid as a factor in the causation of disease : a contribution to the pathology of high arterial tension, headache, epilepsy, mental depression, gout, rheumatism, diabetes, Bright's disease, and other disorders / by Alexander Haig.

  • Alexander Haig
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Uric acid as a factor in the causation of disease : a contribution to the pathology of high arterial tension, headache, epilepsy, mental depression, gout, rheumatism, diabetes, Bright's disease, and other disorders / by Alexander Haig. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    suffering from organic disease, I gave up all butcher meat and replaced it by milk and fish. I had previously tried a great variety of alterations in diet, including an increased allowance of meat and various altera- tions in quantity and quality of less important constituents, such as sugar, tea, coffee, and tobacco, without any noticeable result. But on the non-meat diet a change was at once apparent; my headaches diminished both in frequency and severity, and from an average of one in a week they fell steadily, as the diet was persevered in, down to one in a month, one in three, six, eight, or twelve months, and eventually eighteen months elapsed without an attack of notable severity. Since that I have never gone back to butcher meat, and I never intend to, because by avoiding it I obtain what is practi- cally immunity from a disorder which, at one time, bid fair to cripple me and prevent completely all mental and sedentary work; not that the headache was confined to periods of sedentary work, for I have often had to give up portions of a day's shooting because my head was too bad to stand the noise and concussion of firing, and yet this was in the open air of the country, and when a book had probably not been opened for weeks, and under conditions which were infinitely more favourable to health than those in which I now exist and have immunity. But if I at any time forget my lesson of the past and pre- sume on my apparent security from attack, if I dine with two or three friends in the same week, and especially if I take both meat and wine, of the action of which I shall speak presently, I am practically certain to have a more or less severe headache in two or three days' time ; though, as will appear fm-ther on, I can generally prevent the intense pain from which I used to suffer in former days. Having arrived, then, at the conclusion that leaving off butcher meat had practically relieved me of headache, I began to ask why this was so, and at fii-st {Practitioner, 1884) I was inclined to attribute it to the formation of some poison possibly
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