Dr. Hunter continues:
“Not only the liver, but the kidney, spleen, and brain, and the small blood-vessels in every part of the body share in this degeneration of tissue; and strangely enough (and not unlike the French experiment), this amyloid, waxy, or lardaceous tissue is indigestible by the gastric juice. It is washed flesh made inside the body, and is good for nothing either dead or alive.
“The washed flesh fed to those poor dogs contained abundance of nitrogen and carbon; but these alone, as Liebig remarked, were as useless as stones in the absence of saline matters—not of common salt, be it remembered, for that is found in excess in the fossil organs mentioned. The essential salines that can be readily washed out of food are chiefly two—potash salts and alkaline phosphates. These are also the two that are found deficient, about 50 per cent. in the waxy form of degenerated tissue. This is the type most common in atrophied children, and in persons suffering from consumption[60] and other wasting diseases; but it is not uncommon in the capillaries and small arteries of many who seem in health.
[60] See chapters on “Consumption.”
“When vegetables are soaked in cold water to keep them fresh, when they are blanched in hot water to please our eye, or when they are well boiled and their essence drained off that we may eat the depleted residue, those soluble salines are almost entirely extracted. And what are left? Chiefly the less soluble salts of lime and magnesia—just those elements
so abundant in the cretaceous degeneration of blood-vessels.
“Potash is the alkaline element of formed tissue; its absence is one great cause of scurvy, as well as of the waxy and perhaps the cretaceous types of degeneration.[61] A little examination of our modern commoner foods will show how deficient they are in this element.
[61] See chapter on “Bright’s Disease.”
“Bread was, I suppose, at one time, the ‘staff of life,’ but it could hardly have been white bread. Of it, one pound contains about seven grains of potash, or nearly twenty grains less than a pound of brown bread. Potatoes, if peeled, steeped and boiled in plenty of water, contain only about twenty-one grains in the pound, as against thirty-seven if boiled in their skins. The skins surpass the center about four-fold in salines. Cabbages and all leafy vegetables lose much more, as the water gets right through every portion of them.
“Arrowroot, cornflour, and most of those prepared foods are more deceitful than the washed flesh of the French academicians. Stewed fruits, as made by some cooks, are also guilty of the wash. Even porridge, haricot beans, pease, etc., are by some cooks soaked when raw (this water being thrown away), and thus much depleted.” After simple washing, all vegetables, including beans and pease, if soaked at all, should be boiled in the water in which they are soaked; and, finally, the water from which the cooked