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
The most obstinate scurvy has often been cured by a vegetable diet; nay,
milk alone will frequently do more in that disease than any medicine.
Hence it is evident, that if vegetables and milk were more used in diet,
we should have less scurvy, and likewise fewer putrid and inflammatory
fevers. Fresh vegetables, indeed, come to be daily more used in diet;
this laudable practice we hope will continue to gain ground.
Our aliment ought neither to be too moist nor too dry. Moist aliment
relaxes the solids, and renders the body feeble. Thus we see females,
who live much on tea and other watery diet, generally become weak, and
unable to digest solid food: hence proceed hysterics, and all their
dreadful consequences. On the other hand, food that is too dry, renders
the solids in a manner rigid, and the humours viscid, which disposes the
body to inflammatory fevers, scurvies, and the like.
Much has been said on the ill effects of tea in diet. They are, no
doubt, numerous; but they proceed rather from the imprudent use of it,
than from any bad qualities in the tea itself. Tea is now the universal
breakfast in this part of the world; but the morning is surely the most
improper time of the day for drinking it. Most delicate persons, who, by
the bye, are the greatest tea-drinkers, cannot eat any thing in the
morning. If such persons, after fasting ten or twelve hours, drink four
or five cups of tea without eating almost any bread, it must hurt them.
Good tea, taken in moderate quantity, not too strong, nor too hot, nor
drank upon an empty stomach, will seldom do harm; but if it be bad,
which is often the case, or substituted in the room of solid food, it
must have many ill effects.
The arts of cookery render many things unwholesome, which are not so in
their own nature. By jumbling together a number of different
ingredients, in order to make a poignant sauce or rich soup, the
composition proves almost a poison. All high seasoning, pickles, &c. are
only incentives to luxury, and never fail to hurt the stomach. It were
well for mankind, if cookery, as an art, were entirely prohibited. Plain
roasting or boiling is all that the stomach requires. These alone are
sufficient for people in health, and the sick have still less need of a
cook.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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