On gout : its history, its causes, and its cure / by William Gairdner.

  • William Gairdner
Date:
1851
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On gout : its history, its causes, and its cure / by William Gairdner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    227/318 (page 215)
    assimilation is greatest, and in whom is found the most complex structure of digestive organs. Nearly all of them belong to the class of mammalia, but though destined at a future period to manifest the greatest power of conversion and assimilation, they live or are intended to live for weeks on the milk of the mother. It is only by slow degrees, and after the lapse of a long period, that they learn to live wholly on grass. But all these beneficial and well-contrived arrange- ments of Nature are overtmiied by maternal pedantry. The wholesome milk is found fault with, on the most slender pretexts. The bottle, tops-and-bottoms, biscuit-powder, farinaceous foods, arrow-root, and other poisons are thrust upon the miserable little being, whose taste, hke that of older profligates, is soon swayed from the course of nature. The diges- tion is distm'bed and perverted, and the results are flatulence, colic, consuming diarrhoea, and frightful convulsions, by which thousands of these young creatures are destroyed. It may seem almost incredible to those whose observation has not been called to this subject, that childhoof], that time of fabulous health, should be represented as the beginning of disease. Such, how- ever, too certainly very often is the case; but as the child increases in years, the stomach becomes educated to its office, and the youth acquires the power of