Maintaining Health (Formerly Health and Efficiency)Alsaker, Rasmus Larssen
Science
Maintaining Health (Formerly Health and Efficiency)
Alsaker, Rasmus Larssen
Diet; Hygiene
Cholera infantum causes the death of many babies. It never occurs in
babies who are fed moderately on natural, clean food, not to exceed
three or four times a day. The child is cross. The mother thinks that it
is cross because it is hungry and accordingly feeds. The real cause of
the irritability is the overfeeding that has already taken place. The
baby has had so much milk that it is unable to digest all of it. A part
of the milk spoils in the digestive tract. This fermented material is
partly absorbed and irritates the whole system. A part of it remains in
the alimentary tract where it acts as a direct local irritant to the
intestines. When these are irritated, the blood-vessels begin to pour
out their serum to soothe the bowels and the result is diarrhea. The
sick child is fed often. Digestive power is practically absent. The
additional food given ferments and more serum has to be thrown out to
protect the intestinal walls. Soon there is a well established case of
cholera infantum.
If only enough food had been given to satisfy bodily requirements, none
of the milk would have spoiled in the alimentary tract. If all feeding
had been stopped as soon as the child became irritable and pinched
looking about the mouth and nose, and all the water desired had been
given and the child kept warm, there would have been no serious disease.
In these cases, the less food given the quicker the recoveries and the
fewer the fatalities.
Another common disease of childhood is adenoids. To talk of these
maladies as diseases is rather misleading, for they are merely symptoms
of perverted nutrition, but we are compelled to make the best of our
medical language.
Adenoids are due to indigestion. The indigestion is due to overeating.
This is how it comes about: A child eats more than can be digested,
generally bolting the food, which is often of a mushy character. The
excessive amount of food can not be digested, and as the intestines and
the stomach are moist and have a temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit,
fermentation soon takes place. Some of the results of fermentation in
the alimentary tract are acids, gases and bacterial poisons. These
deleterious substances are absorbed into the blood stream and go to all
parts of the body, acting as irritants. We do not know why they cause
adenoids in one child and catarrh in another. It is easy enough to say
that children are predisposed that way, which is no information at all.
It seems that all of us have some weak point, and here disease has a
tendency to localize. What part the sympathetic nervous system plays, we
do not know. Glandular tissue is rather unstable and therefore it
becomes diseased easily and adenoids are therefore quite frequent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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