“If true. But in that case, shouldn't we be liable to inflame occasionally?” objected her husband.
“It is said,” answered Harry, “that spontaneous combustion does happen sometimes; particularly in great spirit drinkers. I don't see why it should not, if the system were to become too inflammable. Drinking alcohol would be likely to load the constitution with carbon, which would be fuel for the fire, at any rate.”
“The deuce!” exclaimed Mr. Bagges, pushing his brandy-and-water from him. “We had better take care how we indulge in combustibles.”
“At all events,” said Harry, “it must be bad to have too much fuel in us. It must choke the fire, I should think, if it did not cause inflammation; which Dr. Truepenny says it does, meaning, by inflammation, gout, and so on, you know, uncle.”
“Ahem!” coughed Mr. Bagges.
“Taking in too much fuel, I dare say, you know, uncle, means eating and drinking to excess,” continued Harry. “The best remedy, the doctor says, for overstuffing is exercise. A person who uses great bodily exertion, can eat and drink more without suffering from it than one who leads an inactive life; a fox-hunter, for instance, in comparison with an alderman. Want of exercise and too much nourishment must make a man either fat or ill. If the extra hydrogen and carbon are not burnt out, or otherwise got rid of, they turn to blubber, or cause some disturbance in the system, intended by Nature to throw them off, which is called a disease. Walking, riding, running, increase the breathing—as well as the perspiration—and make us burn away our carbon and hydrogen in proportion. Dr. Truepenny declares that if people would only take in as much fuel as is requisite to keep up a good fire, his profession would be ruined.”
“The good old advice—Baillie's, eh?—or Abernethy's—live upon sixpence a day, and earn it,” Mr. Bagges observed.
“Well, and then, uncle, in hot weather the appetite is naturally weaker than it is in cold—less heat is required, and therefore less food. So in hot climates; and the chief reason, says the doctor, why people ruin their health in India is their spurring and goading their stomachs to crave what is not good for them, by spices and the like. Fruits and vegetables are the proper things to eat in such countries, because they contain little carbon compared to flesh, and they are the diet of the natives of those parts of the world. Whereas food with much carbon in it, meat, or even mere fat or oil, which is hardly any thing else than carbon and hydrogen, are proper in very cold regions, where heat from within is required to supply the want of it without. That is why the Laplander is able, as I said he does, to devour train-oil. And Dr. Truepenny says that it may be all very well for Mr. M'Gregor to drink raw whisky at deer-stalking [pg 677] in the Highlands, but if Major Campbell combines that beverage with the diversion of tiger-hunting in the East Indies, habitually, the chances are that the major will come home with a diseased liver.”
“Upon my word, sir, the whole art of preserving health appears to consist in keeping up a moderate fire within us,” observed Mr. Bagges.
“Just so, uncle, according to my friend the doctor. ‘Adjust the fuel,’ he says, ‘to the draught’—he means the oxygen; ‘keep the bellows properly at work, by exercise, and your fire will seldom want poking.’ The doctor's pokers, you know, are pills, mixtures, leeches, blisters, lancets, and things of that sort.”