A dialogue between a bilious patient and a physician / [James Henry].

  • James Henry
Date:
1838
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A dialogue between a bilious patient and a physician / [James Henry]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Physician. You still rely entirely upon medicine, and only transfer your confidence from one kind to another, forgetting that I informed you, soon after you entered the room, that your disease is one of those which cannot be cured by any medicine whatever ; having then proposed to effect your cure by the regu¬ lation of your diet and regimen, and by the substitution of wholesome for unwholesome habits of living, I shall now more fully explain to you my meaning. Shortly after eating, you feel a sense of weight and oppression exactly where the stomach is situated; you are conscious that something is going on wrong there; you bring up acid liquor, or wind, or mouthfuls of half digested food; these all coming from the stomach afford suffi¬ cient evidence that your food and it do not agree, that your stomach is unable properly to digest the food you have put into it. It is plain that the fault is not in the kind or quality of the food, because, as you just now told me, you have the same symptoms only differing in degree, no matter of what kind or of what quality the food may have been. As the fault is not in the quality, it must be in the quantity of the food as compared with the powers of the stomach; but your stomach was formerly able to digest this quantity without in¬ convenience ; let us try if we can explain the reason of the change, or why it happens that you cannot now digest the same quantity of food, which some ten or twenty years ago you digested w7ith the greatest ease. First then, when you arrived at the full maturity of growth, and still more when you passed that period, as there were no new parts to be formed, there was necessarily less demand for nutriment than when you were in the prime of youth and still growing; there was therefore less appetite for food, and less power in the stomach to digest it. Secondly, The season of
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