The history of salt

by Evan Marlett Boddy

Those who believe that man is an organism of vegetable proclivities, and would have him live upon vegetables exclusively, who point with a triumphant smile to scurvy as resulting solely from long-continued abstention from vegetable food, combined with the ingestion of salted meat, should remember that any kind of food indulged in to the exclusion of others injures the health, reduces the physical strength, and deteriorates the blood. They are right as far as their argument goes, but they lose sight of some very remarkable facts when they describe scurvy as originating from salt.

Vegetables which are generally used as aliment are young and fresh; on board ship, and especially in long voyages, they are in nine cases out of ten old and musty, and those belonging to the compositæ, such as cabbages, rapidly degenerate into decomposition, generating a very poisonous gas, viz. sulphuretted hydrogen; while those belonging to the leguminosæ, as peas and beans, lose their great nutritious principle, legumen, which is identical with the caseine of milk, and which renders them such invaluable articles of diet. Besides, if vegetables are kept for any length of time, even if excluded from the air, they are liable to rapid decomposition immediately they are exposed to its influences. I therefore think, as I have asserted already, that salted meat is not wholly responsible for scurvy, and that it much more frequently arises from its being salted in the early stages of putrescence.

These vegetable reformers and abstainers from salt are, I am afraid, ignorant of these facts.

If mankind were to act in accordance with the wishes of visionaries, and those who are prone to scientific credulity, and who look upon themselves as philanthropic philosophers, we should speedily be reduced to the unenviable condition of the Frenchman’s horse; for to some, animal food is pernicious, salt is in some respects poisonous, water is to be discarded as worse than useless, stimulants in the hour of sickness are to be avoided, and are never to be touched; vegetables are mere woody fibre or starch-cells. They are considerate, however; they have left us fish! This staple of food is not yet ostracised.

Happy is the man who lives according to the dictates of nature, temperately and wholesomely, and who does not run like a thoughtless being into extremes, originating from hare-brained fanatics, and from unpractical utilitarians.

Salt is a preventive of those disfiguring eruptions which frequently affect the young about the face and neck, and which in the majority of cases arise from a defective state of the blood. One need only take a stroll through a crowded thoroughfare to find that this is the fact. These young people, instead of possessing complexions which are indicative of health and purity of blood, carry in their countenances unmistakable marks which cannot escape the eye of an observant and discriminating passer-by. If we were to make inquiries, we should find that they are, with few exceptions, absolute strangers to salt, and that probably they have been brought up from their infancy by their parents never to touch it.

This neglect shows the grossest ignorance on the part of these people, and calls for the most stringent censure; it is almost incredible, to find so many unaccustomed to the use of salt, and who never impress upon their children the need of it, and that the continuance of their health is partly dependent upon a daily use of a substance which is a highly important constituent of the blood.

I have drawn my reader’s attention to the facts that the blood of scrofulous persons is deficient in salt, that the amount is variable, and that the deficiency is at once discernible in the objectionable condition of the skin of the face and neck; but here we have people enjoying a fair share of health, who, owing to ignorance or indifference, are reducing themselves to a state bordering on disease, and who would otherwise be total strangers to those ailments which only attack the impure, the luxurious and intemperate.

We have seen that salt is necessary in the animal economy, otherwise it would not exist as a constituent of the blood. It is equally necessary for the preservation of health; for in the blood of those people who are suffering from disease, we detect a visible decrease. In some cases of fever the diminution is remarkable; if the febrile symptoms increase in severity, we find that there is a corresponding loss of the chloride of sodium. This simple fact alone shows that it is the imperative duty of those who have at heart the well-being of their fellow-creatures, to impress upon them in emphatic language, that if they wish their blood to be in a pure healthy condition, and to be able to ward off the insidious attacks of disease, they must make it a frequent article of diet.

We are all cognisant that disease will be to the end of time one of the scourges of humanity; and at the present day certain maladies are spreading amongst us with the greatest rapidity, all our efforts to eradicate them having been hitherto altogether futile, and the results far from promising. All our medicines, our improved modes of treatment, and our hygienic schemes, ingenious as they undoubtedly are, reflecting the highest honour on their philanthropic originators, have been, and still are to a considerable extent, abortive, and we are still combating with, and succumbing to, this inveterate enemy of mankind.