Diseases of the stomach and intestines : a manual of clinical therapeutics for the student and practitioner / by Dujardin-Beaumetz ; tr. from the 4th French ed. by E.P. Hurd.

  • Georges Octave Dujardin-Beaumetz
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Diseases of the stomach and intestines : a manual of clinical therapeutics for the student and practitioner / by Dujardin-Beaumetz ; tr. from the 4th French ed. by E.P. Hurd. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

    49/422 (page 25)
    would be reversed; it is in fact the adult animals which give the most nutritious meats. Among the birds we must distinguish the common fowl and the wild fowl, and from the point of view of digestibility, the latter presents special conditions, to which Professor Gubler has called attention. These birds of game, you know, undergo a certain degree of putrefaction, and gen- erally are served on our tables a little high. This putrefaction is a sort of fermentation which resembles in certain points peptonization, and on this very account favors stomach digestion. These aliments, which Gubler has characterized by the happy word metazymous aliments, in con- tradistinction to the azymous aliments, bring with them their ferment; the meats which are high (a little tainted), sourcrout, koumiss, sour whey and buttermilk, the spotted cheeses (and such as are old and mouldy), come into this category. So when you have to treat certain feeble stomachs in which the secretion of gastric juice is tardy and defi- cient, you will order game that is a little high. As for fish, they are divided into three groups; those with white meat (trout, sole, whiting)—these are certainly the most digestible, but are also the least nourishing; those with yellow meat (salmon), are more slowly digested but contain more of nutritive principles; lastly, those with fat meat (the mackerel and eel), are very nourishing but of laborious digestion, because they require digestion in the intestines.8 Moreover, Prof. Almen, of Upsal, has recently published a very com- plete analysis of the flesh of different fishes, fresh, cured, and in the dried state, as compared with the flesh of beef. [See next page.] Crustaceans and Mollusks are also much in use as articles of diet. I shall only allude to oysters, which are rapidly absorbed and constitute a useful aliment in certain affections of the stomach.9 Do not think that the composition of these various kinds of meat is widely different. Compare, for instance, the analyses furnished by Schutz, Payen, Gautier and Almen, and you will see that between the flesh of the carp, of beef and of the oyster, there are great similarities of composition.10 The mode of preparation of these divers aliments has a great deal to do with their digestive and nutritive properties. In order not to de- vote too much space to a consideration of this question, I shall here give particular attention to the meats only. Ought these, to be eaten raw, roasted or boiled ? But this is a question which, in order to be treated satisfactorily, requires certain details which I will defer till the next lecture.