Miss L.C. writes:—I should be deeply indebted to you if you would advise me in the following matter. I have been suffering from a recurrence of boils on different parts of my body during the last six months. I have consulted a local doctor, but he can find no reason for their appearance, but suggested I should try a mixed diet, to include some animal food, rather than adhere to vegetarianism as I have done for some two years past.
My diet is about as follows:—
On rising.—Tumblerful of hot water.
Breakfast (eight o'clock).—One egg, toasted bread (wholemeal) and butter, with either a little lettuce or marmalade and either weak tea or cocoa.
Lunch (one o'clock).—Steamed green or root vegetable, with cheese sauce or macaroni cheese or similar savoury, or nuts. Boiled or baked pudding or stewed fruit with custard or blanc mange.
Tea (four o'clock).—Tea or cocoa, with or without a little bread and butter and cake.
Supper (7 o'clock).—Vegetable soup, milk pudding and a little cheese, butter and salad and wholemeal bread.
I am forty-nine years of age, lead a fairly active life, frequently taking walking exercise. I am very tall and weigh twelve stone. Have had no serious illness, but been more or less anæmic all my life.
If you can tell me whether there is anything wrong in connection with my diet and suggest the cause of, and treatment for, the boils I shall be exceedingly obliged.
In order to help this correspondent to permanently get rid of these boils, we must first ascertain what those troublesome manifestations are and look to the causes which produce them.
A boil is a small, tense, painful, inflammatory swelling appearing in or upon the skin, and is due to the local death or gangrene of a small portion of the skin's surface. This eventually comes away in the form of a core, and, until this has cleared away, the boil will not heal or cease to be painful.
Boils occur chiefly on the neck, arms or buttocks. If very large they are known as carbuncles, and if they occur on the fingers or toes they are described as whitlows. It is often the friction of a frayed-out collar or cuff, of tight waist clothing, or, in the case of whitlows, the introduction of some irritant or poison between the nail and the skin that determines the precise site at which they will come.
Boils, although rarely dangerous to life, are usually accompanied by pain severe out of all proportion to the extent of surface involved. This gives rise to much broken rest and loss of vitality, which at once ceases when the boil has finished its course. Boils usually occur in series or crops.
Now large numbers of people wear collars and cuffs with frayed edges, or handle irritants with their fingers, but they do not necessarily contract boils or whitlows. Therefore, we see that there must be other factors to be taken into consideration to account for their presence. The orthodox germ-loving practitioner may tell you that a boil is a purely local disorder and that a certain form of microbe, known as the Staphylococcus pyogenes, is the cause of it. This germ, he asserts, lives normally on the surface of the skin and, when this surface becomes broken, it enters the part and infects it, thereby starting the boil.
If this is true every person who wears old collars or dabbles his hands in dirt should without exception contract boils. This is obviously untrue.
The factor to be considered, then, is this. What is it that induces boils in one person and not in another under identical circumstances? The answer is obvious. The boil is not a local disease at all, but is a manifestation of some constitutional defect, or of some impurity of the blood stream, which enables this microbe to find a congenial breeding ground.
The people who suffer most from boils are young or middle-aged adults, and we usually find the two extremes among sufferers. There is the full-blooded, often overfed, individual and there is the pale, debilitated and emaciated person whose constitution is broken down by worry, overwork, sexual troubles, unhealthy surroundings or badly selected foods.
If we inquire into the constitutional history of these cases we shall almost invariably discover that the digestive or assimilative processes of the body are not working smoothly. This may be due to the worry or overwork, or to unhealthy surroundings which dis-harmonise the digestive and nutritive functions, or to nervous exhaustion from one cause or another, or it may be due to the wrong diet, which is filling the colon (or large bowel) with fermenting poisons.