Luncheon is a desultory sort of meal, and though most people eat something, many do so only because they think that it is the thing to do, and not because they are really hungry.
If you will accompany us, we will go to see the luncheon given by Lord X. at his Surrey home. But we cannot go as guests, for not only have we not been invited, but we are going to criticise many things about the table and the meal. We must, therefore, remain invisible and inaudible, for it is unpardonable to make remarks at the table, even if those remarks would save a whole company from indigestion and a sleepless night.
Before the meal is served, our eyes are offended by something on the sideboard which is sufficient to destroy the appetite of any extra delicately-minded person if she only knew its secrets.
The object is nothing less than a cold pheasant pie ornamented by the head or feathers of the bird whose flesh the pie is supposed to contain. We want you to examine that ornament, and we feel pretty certain that if you do, you will never again eat meat pies.
In order that the carcases of dead animals should not encumber the earth, it has been ordained that when an animal dies, its body rapidly decomposes and becomes dissolved into simple gases. The agents that bring about the dissolution of the body are various. The chief agents which cause the decomposition of organic matter are microbes. The majority of these do not produce diseases in man, but some of them do, and some of these you might find on that pheasant pie if you could see it through a microscope.
Similarly offensive, but to a less degree, is the practice of putting pigeons’ feet sticking outside a steak pie to suggest that the remainder of the birds is inside, and putting feathers into the tails of roast pheasants.
One of the chief values of cooking is to sterilise food, so why foul the food you have so carefully sterilised by sticking decaying matter into it?
The first item of the luncheon consists of oysters, and we notice that only three out of the company of twelve partake of them. As nearly everybody who can afford them likes oysters, there is probably some special reason why nine out of twelve persons refuse them. Doubtless it is the typhoid scare, and we are much pleased to see that some persons, at all events, do occasionally give a side thought to preventive medicine.
The question of the causation of typhoid fever by oysters is one of great importance, and one that should be clearly understood by everyone. That oysters are one of the means by which some recent epidemics of typhoid fever have been spread is undoubted, but the exact part that they have played is not so easy to understand, for the latest commission upon the question found that the typhoid bacillus is killed by immersion in sea-water, that it did not occur in any oysters that they opened, and when it was injected into the oyster, it was promptly killed.
This seems to say emphatically that oysters cannot harbour the typhoid bacillus, and therefore cannot produce typhoid fever. But medicine is not as easy as that. That the oysters they examined could not produce typhoid fever is certain, but their remarks do not by any means prove that typhoid is not spread by any oysters.