In hæmorrhage from the lungs, when the usual remedies have failed, a solution of salt will sometimes arrest it. When applied to a cut the bleeding ceases. These little facts are well worth knowing, because salt is always to be found in every home, and so may be given or applied in case there is no medical man at hand; matrons and nurses of small hospitals, infirmaries, and workhouses should be acquainted with them in case of an emergency.
We have now before us the properties of salt in a medical and dietetic sense; that indirectly it is a therapeutical agent of some value cannot be denied; that it is an important aliment is a fact which cannot be explained away; and that it is a preserver of health all must allow.
That it is of a deleterious tendency is a mere assertion as unsubstantial as “thin air,” and as flimsy as gossamer—magno conatu, magnas nugas.
[CHAPTER VIII.]
PHYSIOLOGICAL PROPERTIES.
Prejudice is the daughter of ignorance; and nothing exemplifies the truth of this more thoroughly than the senseless repugnance to salt which is now so remarkably prevalent. Ask these persons for their reasons, if we can dignify them as such, for disliking salt; their answers, as a rule, will be trifling platitudes, altogether unworthy of refutation, or even of moderate attention.
Objections founded on imperfect, or an affectation of knowledge, are not worth the trouble of confuting, even if they be supported by a fair amount of intelligence; but when the opponents of salt begin to base their assertions upon science, and demur on medicinal, dietetic, and physiological grounds, then we must meet them armed with similar weapons to those they have chosen, with the handling of which they are but imperfectly acquainted, and which therefore recoil upon them in such a way as prove that though they may be shrewd, they are but badly informed and credulous scientists.
At the present day the science of physiology has arrived at such a pitch of perfection that there is not a single secretion, tissue, or organ of the body, with the exception of the spleen, which has not been investigated, and the functions divulged and made so plain that it is quite divested of that apparent mystery which formerly enshrouded it; though our kind friends, the anti-vivisectionists, would willingly adopt the most unjust measures to prevent the study of life from being more perfect than it already is: they protest with well-feigned horror at a frog or a rabbit, under the influence of chloroform, being experimented upon for the benefit of humanity, while they see, without allowing a sign of disapprobation to escape from them, an inoffensive hare chased to death for the amusement of gentility, and probably gloat over, with pleasure, the dying agonies of a stag: a sight which gratifies the somewhat questionable proclivities of refined and elegant ladies, who race their horses out of breath to gaze on the sanguinary scene.
Had it not been for physiological research we should not have known that the chloride of sodium was such an important constituent in the animal economy; we should have been in utter ignorance of the science of life, and we should never have known how man is begotten, how developed, or how he dies. With regard to the two processes of decay and repair, or how the human organism, from a mere cell, gradually becomes a being highly organised, mentally as well as physically, we should have known nothing. Physiology has been a boon to humanity and an inexhaustible field of research to the scientific.