We know that the microscope shows up the ragged edges of the hulls and gives them a fearful aspect; but if the microscope could reason, and if it was given to arguing all questions submitted to it, I fancy it would speedily silence these objections to wheat-meal, so far as they rest upon the matter of the coarseness and the irritating capacity of the hull, by asking the microscopist to take a little glance at the stomach itself: an internal view of the digestive tract would disclose the fact that, even in the case of the most “sensitive and finely organized” subject, the lining of the stomach, for example, bears a stronger resemblance to a quartz mill than do these terrible hulls to sticks and stones. The trouble has been with those who seek to improve too much over Nature’s methods, and especially is this the case in the question under discussion, they have reasoned mainly from one side of the question. Machinery has accomplished no end of good things, and without doubt has even greater victories yet in store, in its legitimate field; but that field is not in the line of improving on the food that Nature provides for us humans. It can and does improve over the old methods of sowing, reaping, threshing, and cleansing the various grains—no one desires to dispute this; but when the ripe, clean kernel of wheat, for instance, is placed before us, the office of machinery is ended, except so far as crushing the grain for those whose teeth or temper will not admit
of chewing it. A shrewd though illiterate stable keeper said to me, in advocating whole, instead of cracked corn for horses and cattle, “it gets the juice of their teeth, and does them twice as much good. Give them meal, or cracked corn, and they don’t have to chew it long enough to get the right action of the saliva.”
People who neglect the most obvious hygienic rules, thereby bringing upon themselves sickness and pain, and search for special articles of diet that may seem to promise relief, remind me of a junk-dealer who would pass by old stoves, pots, kettles, and crowbars, and search for a needle in a hay-stack! The theory of the anti-wheat-meal men seems plausible at first sight, and it has been held, temporarily, by some very sound men; but one after another these have dropped it as untenable. To be sure, the ranks are kept full by new recruits, who join faster than the thinkers fall out. There are a thousand dyspeptics for every discerning man, and, in any event, all such—all persons, in fact, are to be congratulated when they adopt a compromise in the shape of fine flour which claims to give them all the essential elements of the wheat, and yet save their “delicate” and sensitive stomachs needless labor and irritation. But I find that the class who are saving lives constantly, hold to the entire meal as the only means of securing perfect bread—the staff of life.
Says Oswald: “We can not breathe pure oxygen. For analogous reasons bran flour [whole meal] makes better bread than bolted flour; meat and saccharine
fruits are healthier than meat extracts and pure glucose. In short, artificial extracts and compounds are, on the whole, less wholesome than the palatable products of nature. In the case of bran-flour and certain fruits with a large percentage of wholly innutritious matter, chemistry fails to account for this fact, but biology suggests the mediate cause: the normal type of our physical constitution dates from a period when the digestive organs of our (frugivorous) ancestors adapted themselves to such food—a period compared with whose duration the age of grist-mills and made dishes is but of yesterday.”
This doctoring of the cereals can never prove of service in the end, except to the manufacturers and dealers; these “preparations,” however honestly made, and supposing for argument’s sake that the machinery accomplishes what the manufacturers intend, will never, in and of themselves,—i. e., except so far as they take the place of white flour—prove beneficial to mankind, and least of all to sick people, valetudinarians, and the sedentary classes,—the very ones who need the best. Imagine a constipated dyspeptic, with a heavy fur coat on his tongue, and, of course, a heavier one on the lining of his stomach—his entire alimentary canal so covered with this morbid growth that digestion and absorption are well-nigh prohibited—alarmed lest the microscopic particles of wheat-hulls should injure his delicate and sensitive inwards! “Delicate!” “sensitive!” why, it takes half a cupful of salts to move them, and that but faintly, while a pint of strong coffee makes no
impression; when if they were even normally sensitive a tablespoonful of the former, or a single cup of the latter, would purge them violently. Sensitive! they are dead, or at least dying. Why, for this class of patients, I would sooner add the straw than remove the hull, as better calculated, by all odds, to meet the necessities of their condition. On the other hand, when the disease assumes the opposite form—when the tongue is raw, and the intestinal tract acutely inflamed, and from any cause preternaturally sensitive—there is but one thing in the Materia Medica of Nature that is absolutely fit to swallow, and that is pure water. (See Chronic Dyspepsia.) It matters not what else is comforting, temporarily,—medicine, gruel, beef-tea, milk, or what not,—the comfort and advantage are derived solely from the water, which constitutes three-fourths to nine-tenths of the whole; the other elements being injurious, and, often enough, fatal, preventing as they do the healing of the inflamed mucous membrane.