508. Diet for Patients.—"I am every day asked by my patients, what diet they should take. I generally answer by the question, 'How old are you?' Suppose they say, Forty—'Forty!' I rejoin: 'you who have had forty years' experience of what agrees and disagrees with you—how can you ask me who have no experience of the kind in your case whatever?' Surely, gentlemen, a patient's experience of what agrees and disagrees with his own particular constitution, is far better than any theory of yours or mine. Why, bless my life! in many chronic diseases, the diet which a man can take to-day, would be rejected with disgust to-morrow; under such circumstances, would you still, according to common medical practice, tell a sick person to go on taking what he himself found worried him to death? Gentlemen, I hope better things of you.
"The only general caution you need give your patients on the subject of diet, is moderation; moderation in using the things which they find agree with themselves best. You may direct them to take their food in small quantities at a time, at short periodic intervals—intervals of two or three hours, for example; and tell them to take the trouble to masticate it properly before they swallow it, so as not to give a weak stomach the double work of mastication and digestion—these processes being, even in health, essentially distinct. Unless properly comminuted and mixed with the saliva, how can you expect the food to be anything but a source of inconvenience to persons whom the smallest trifle will frequently discompose?"—Dr. Dickson's Lectures.
509. Abstinence, or Starvation.—Beware of carrying this too far!—for "abstinence engenders maladies." So Shakspeare said, and so nature will tell you, in the teeth of all the doctors in Europe! Abstinence may produce almost every form of disease which has entered into the consideration of the physician.—Ibid.
510. The Blood is the Life—never be Bled!—"He who loses a pint of blood, loses a pint of his life. Of what is the body composed? Is it not of blood, and blood only? What fills up the excavation of an ulcer or an abscess? What re-produces the bone of the leg or thigh, after it has been thrown off dead, in nearly all its length? what but the living BLOOD, under the vito-electrical influence of the brain and nerves! How does the slaughtered animal die? Of loss of blood solely. Is not the blood, then, in the impressive language of Scripture, 'the life of the flesh?' How remarkable, that while the value of the blood to the animal economy should be thus so distinctly and emphatically acknowledged, blood-letting is not even once alluded to, among the various modes of cure mentioned in the sacred volume. We have 'balms,' 'balsams,' 'baths,' 'charms,' 'physics,'—'poultices,' even—but loss of blood, never! Had it been practised by the Jews, why this omission? Will the men who now so lavishly pour out the blood, dispute its importance in the animal economy? Will they deny that it forms the basis of the solids? that when the body has been wasted by long disease, it is by the blood only it can recover its healthy volume and appearance?"—Dr. Dickson's Lectures.
THE TOILET.
511. Personal beauty is the gift of nature, but its preservation depends much on the care of its possessor. Beauty may also be cultivated and enhanced; even plainness may be improved, and the defects that sickness, accidents, and age impress on the human features and form, may be greatly remedied by simple means, and attention to a few important rules.