In towns we often observe the bad effects of over feeding in young female servants recently arrived from the country. From being accustomed to constant exercise in the open air, and to the comparatively innutritious diet on which the labouring classes subsist, they pass all at once, with appetite, digestion, and health in their fullest vigour, to the confinement of a house, to the impure atmosphere of a crowded city, and to a rich and stimulating diet. Appetite, still keen, is freely indulged; but waste being diminished, while nutrition is increased, fulness is speedily induced, followed in its turn by inflammatory disease or fever, which sometimes cuts short life, where, with better management, health might have been preserved for years. In many instances, again, life is saved by the digestive powers being the first to give way, and refusing either to receive or to concoct the same quantity of aliment as before, and the patient then escapes with the minor evils of protracted indigestion. This latter result ensued in an instructive case mentioned by Heidler, where a moderate acquaintance with the laws of the animal economy might have saved months of suffering, and even of danger, to the patient.--“A young woman of a healthy constitution, brought up in all the simplicity of country habits, passed at once, on her marriage, to a _less active mode of life_, and to a _much more elegant table_. In a short time she began to complain of irritability, lassitude, various spasmodic sensations, and habitual constipation. Hypochondria was soon added to the other symptoms; her hope of becoming a mother being always deceived, an additional glass of wine, bark, and other tonics, were ordered. The evil increased. The patient became melancholic, and believed that she was always swallowing pins. In the course of the year, she became so emaciated and yellow, that her mother, who had not seen her for eleven months, could scarcely recognise her. After an eighteen months’ course of purgatives, and two courses of Marienbad-water, she entirely recovered.”[44] If the medical adviser first consulted in this case had possessed the slightest acquaintance with the principle I have been explaining, he would no more have regarded wine and tonics as the best remedies for the oppressive languor of excessive feeding, than he would have sought to extinguish a flame by pouring oil into the fire.