Martyria; or, Andersonville PrisonHamlin, Augustus C. (Augustus Choate)
History
Martyria; or, Andersonville Prison
Hamlin, Augustus C. (Augustus Choate)
Andersonville Prison; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Prisoners and prisons
Of the varieties of Indian corn in America, the yellow flinty corn is
reckoned the sweetest and most nutritive; the white corn of the South
makes the fairest, but considerably the weakest flour. We do not find
special fault with the coarsely ground meal, provided the cob is not
included, for Mayer has pointed out, in discarding the commercial bran we
throw away fourteen times as much phosphoric acid as there is in superfine
flour. In this bran are contained most of the layers of gluten, in which
are lodged the phosphates and the companion nitrogenous compounds--the
sources of living tissues. The nutritious Graham bread is an example; also
the pumpernickel of Westphalia, the black bread of Russia, the coarse
oatmeal of Scotland, contain all the gluten, all the phosphates and
nitrogenous compounds, as well as the starch of the grains. Such was the
bread that Celsus considered as equal to flesh in its capacity of
nourishing.
XVII.
Fresh meat was rarely furnished to the prison, according to the reports
and statements of witnesses, and we should doubt that it was furnished at
all, if it were not for the number of sections of the horns of cattle
which are strewn about the enclosure, and which the prisoners had used for
drinking dishes; still, many of these horns may have been taken from the
cattle killed for the guards.
That the issue of fresh beef would have been beneficial to the men, there
is no doubt; in fact, the experiment at Jamaica, which continued twenty
years, proves it; for the troops who were fed with a larger allowance of
fresh meat suffered far less from dysentery than any of the troops of the
West India islands. There is always great difficulty in preserving the
good qualities of fresh meat in hot climes, and, on the other hand, the
use of salt meat in the same regions is apt to engender scorbutic
disorders. Whenever putrefactive fermentation begins with any kind of
meat, or any recently living nitrogenized substance, catalytic action
takes place, ammonia is evolved, and the product is no longer pleasant to
the taste or nutritious to the system. Food, when even exposed to vitiated
air, becomes deteriorated in quality, just as good flour is rendered
worthless by mixture with the damaged fungoid grain. Butchers' meat on the
average affords but thirty-five per cent. of real nutritive matter, at
least such was the opinion presented to the French Minister of the
Interior by Vauquelin and Percy. Accepting this determination, we may form
some idea of the relative value of the scanty allowance of the doubtful
beef furnished to the prisoners, if it was furnished at all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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