Domestic medicine : $b or, a treatise on the prevention and cure of diseases by regimen and simple medicines. With an appendix, containing a dispensatory for the use of private practitionersBuchan, William
Science
Domestic medicine : $b or, a treatise on the prevention and cure of diseases by regimen and simple medicines. With an appendix, containing a dispensatory for the use of private practitioners
Buchan, William
Medicine, Popular -- Early works to 1800
Animals which feed grossly, as tame ducks, hogs, &c. are neither so
easily digested, nor afford such wholesome nourishment as others. No
animal can be wholesome which does not take sufficient exercise. Most of
our stalled cattle are crammed with gross food, but not allowed exercise
nor free air; by which means they indeed grow fat, but their juices not
being properly prepared or assimilated, remain crude, and occasion
indigestions, gross humours, and oppression of the spirits, in those who
feed upon them.
Animals are often rendered unwholesome by being overheated. Excessive
heat causes a fever, exalts the animal salts, and mixes the blood so
intimately with the flesh, that it cannot be separated. For this reason,
butchers should be severely punished who over-drive their cattle. No
person would chuse to eat the flesh of an animal which had died in a
high fever; yet that is the case with all over-drove cattle; and the
fever is often raised even to the degree of madness.
But this is not the only way by which butchers render meat unwholesome.
The abominable custom of filling the cellular membrane of animals with
air, in order to make them appear fat, is every day practised. This not
only spoils the meat, and renders it unfit for keeping, but is such a
dirty trick, that the very idea of it is sufficient to disgust a person
of any delicacy at every thing which comes from the shambles. Who can
bear the thought of eating meat which has been blown up with air from
the lungs of a dirty fellow, perhaps labouring under the very worst of
diseases?
Butchers have likewise a method of filling the cellular membranes of
animals with blood. This makes the meat seem fatter, and likewise weigh
more, but is notwithstanding a very pernicious custom, as it both
renders the meat unwholesome and unfit for keeping. I seldom see a piece
of meat from the shambles, where the blood is not diffused through the
cellular texture. I shall not say that this is always the effect of
design; but I am certain it is not the case with animals that are killed
for domestic use, and properly blooded. Veal seems to be most frequently
spoilt in this way. Perhaps that may in some measure be owing to the
practice of carrying calves from a great distance to market, by which
means their tender flesh is bruised, and many of their vessels burst.
No people in the world eat such quantities of animal food as the
English, which is one reason why they are so generally tainted with the
scurvy and its numerous train of consequences, indigestion, low spirits,
hypochondriacism, &c. Animal food was surely designed for man, and, with
a proper mixture of vegetables, it will be found the most wholesome; but
to gorge beef, mutton, pork, fish, and fowl, twice or thrice a day, is
certainly too much. All who value health ought to be contented with
making one meal of flesh in the twenty-four hours, and this ought to
consist of one kind only.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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