Manual of diet in health and disease / by Thomas King Chambers.

  • Chambers, Thomas King, 1818-1889.
Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Manual of diet in health and disease / by Thomas King Chambers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    or who are (like the inmates of prisons) actnally dependent upon us for living at all. Even healthj persons are not absolutely perfect in the performance of all their functions, and a good deal of the food swallowed escapes digestion and is wasted among the excreta. A considerable margin must be allowed for that. And different forms of food and different preparations of those forms are suited, from their mere mechanical construc- tion, to different constitutions of body. A diet which in an old man may be wasted from lack of solution, and which would therefore be a starvation diet to him, may in a young man be richly ample. On the other hand, the easily soluble but scanty diet on which the old man might flourish, would not suffice for his active, growing grandson. Then again, very different lives are necessarily led by different men, and even by the same man at various times, and variations in the mere quantity of food, at the instigation of appetite, are not sufficient to accominodate the diet to the work. Brain-work, body-work, in-door work, and out-door work, all introduce modifications in the daily requirements of the nutritive organs. There are also physiological drains upon the constitution, such as that felt by a nursing mother, and pathological drains, such as that of a purulent discharge, which have to be provided for. And it must be remembered also that many morbid con- ditions, which yet do not keep a patient from his employment, such as gastric catarrh, or tuberculosis, yet interfere with the due solution of the meals. And some, such as gout and diabetes, are aggravated by eatables which are wholesome to a healthy constitution. And there are hereditary tendencies which may be turned into diseases by popular articles of diet, and not a few idiosyncracies to be allowed for. With the safeguards of due allowance for the above ele- ments of variation, and a close eye upon current experiment, the theory of demand and supply in dietetics may be turned to the very best account by rational medicine.