The appetite for “sweets”—candy, syrup, sugar, and fancy dishes deluged with sweet sauces—encouraged to an abnormal degree from infancy, and
the gratification of this appetite throughout life are prolific aids in establishing the phthisical diathesis. There is a natural appetite for sweet fruits and this demand may be safely met by such forms of food, but never by the unbalancing artificial sweets, or proximate principles of food, as cane or beet sugar and the “bon-bons” formed from them.
Victor Hugo,—that grand man who gave us “Les Miserables,”—in the first volume of the series, puts this bit of physiological wisdom into the mouth of the witty libertine, Tholomyés, who uses it, to be sure, in a double sense, which I need not here explain: “Now, listen attentively!” says this oracle of the “four.” “Sugar is a salt. Every salt is desiccating. Sugar is the most desiccating of all salts. It sucks up the liquids from the blood through the veins; thence comes the coagulation, then the solidification of the blood; thence the tubercles in the lungs; thence death. And this is why diabetes borders on consumption.” I commend the above thought to consumptives, and to the parents of fat children—the consumptives of the future. Every grain of artificial sugar swallowed, constitutes a tax upon the system—upon the lungs and kidneys, more particularly—a tax upon the individual’s vitality.
Among the prolific causes of consumption in after life, is that of the involuntary cramming and fattening of infancy, followed up during childhood and youth by a somewhat less excessive gluttony, which is taught inferentially by the conversation and example of the elders, as by constantly dwelling upon the
delights of the palate, arranging entertainments which are feasts of the body, rather than of the mind, in advance of which all classes discuss with excess of interest the palatal pleasures of the coming “good time,” and at which all unite, if not in gorging themselves, at least in feeding themselves for pleasure to the disregard of the true requirements of their bodies for nutriment.
As a result of all this, sedentary persons become, like stall-fed oxen, degenerated with fat; and this, as just remarked about children, is a predisposing cause of consumption. A very large proportion of consumptives, most of them, in fact, are first thus diseased; and when any person is round and plump, or even fairly covered, so to say, and is yet lacking in muscular power—“easily tired”—it is prima facie evidence that the muscular system is degenerated in the manner described; and if the muscles, then the vital organs within, also. Thus we observe that grossness is by no means essential to fatty degeneration, although all obese persons are, of course, thus affected.
The salary of a fireman (“coal heaver”) depends upon his intelligence in the matter of fuelling up his engine with a view to its “health,” power and longevity; that of the cook or caterer, upon his ingenuity in devising means to accomplish the reverse of all this in the case of the human engine placed at his mercy.
“A well-spread board” should be described as one at which the youngest child (whose teeth are cut) may
exercise his will without let or hindrance until, at the first indication of dallying, or “loafing,” over his food, it is evident that he has had enough; and at which the consumptive may eat without being tempted to overindulge, but, paying heed to the first intimation of satiety, rise from the table with the assurance of having performed an agreeable duty, in that he has eaten in quantity and quality, what he can digest and assimilate. The consumptive starves, not for want of food, but for want of digestion and assimilation. It is impossible to emphasize this fact too strongly.
The Scientific American of June 3, 1882, in an article entitled “Tubercle Parasite,”[28] considering Dr.