Assuming, then, that the experimenter has taken sufficient daily tea to have a sensible effect, he will suffer on leaving it off. Let him persevere in the discontinuance, in spite of brain languor and dull headache. He will find that day by day the languor will diminish, and in the course of time (about a fortnight or three weeks in my case) he will be weaned. He will retain from morning to night the full, free, and steady use of all his faculties; will get through his day’s work without any fluctuation of working ability (provided, of course, no other stimulant is used). Instead of his best faculties being dependent on a drug for their awakening, he will be in the condition of true manhood—i.e. able to do his best in any direction of effort, simply in reply to moral demand; able to do whatever is right and advantageous, because his reason shows that it is so. The sense of duty is to such a free man the only stimulus demanded for calling forth his uttermost energies.
If he again returns to his habitual tea, he will again be reduced to more or less of dependence upon it. This condition of dependence is a state of disease precisely analogous to that which is induced by opium and other drugs that operate by temporary abnormal cerebral exaltation. The pleasurable sensations enjoyed by the opium-eater or smoker or morphia injector are more intense than those of the tea-drinker, and the reaction proportionally greater.
I must not leave this subject without a word or two in reference to a widely prevailing and very mischievous fallacy. Many argue and actually believe that because a given drug has great efficiency in curing disease, it must do good if taken under ordinary conditions of health.
No high authorities are demanded for the refutation of this. A little common sense properly used is quite sufficient. It is evident that a medicine, properly so-called, is something which is capable of producing a disturbing or alterative effect on the body generally or some particular organ. The skill of the physician consists in so applying this disturbing agency as to produce an alteration of the state of disease, a direct conversion of the state of disease to a state of health, if possible (which is rarely the case), or more usually the conversion of one state of disease into another of milder character. But, when we are in a state of sound health, any disturbance or alteration must be a change for the worse, must throw us out of health to an extent proportionate to the potency of the drug.
I might illustrate this by a multitude of familiar examples, but they would carry me too far away from my proper subject. There is, however, one class of such remedies which are directly connected with the chemistry of cookery. I refer to the condiments that act as ‘tonics,’ excluding common salt, which is an article of food, though often miscalled a condiment. Salt is food simply because it supplies the blood with one of its normal and necessary constituents, chloride of sodium, without which we cannot live. A certain quantity of it exists in most of our ordinary food, but not always sufficient.
Cayenne pepper may be selected as a typical example of a condiment properly so-called. Mustard is a food and condiment combined; this is the case with some others. Curry powders are mixtures of very potent condiments with more or less of farinaceous materials, and sulphur compounds, which, like the oil of mustard, of onions, garlic, &c., may have a certain amount of special nutritive value.
The mere condiment is a stimulating drug that does its work directly upon the inner lining of the stomach, by exciting it to increased and abnormal activity. A dyspeptic may obtain immediate relief by using cayenne pepper. Among the advertised patent medicines is a pill bearing the very ominous name of its compounder, the active constituent of which is cayenne. Great relief and temporary comfort is commonly obtained by using it as a ‘dinner pill.’ If thus used only as a temporary remedy for an acute and temporary, or exceptional, attack of indigestion all is well, but the cayenne, whether taken in pills or dusted over the food or stewed with it in curries or any otherwise, is one of the most cruel of slow poisons when taken habitually. Thousands of poor wretches are crawling miserably towards their graves, the victims of the multitude of maladies of both mind and body that are connected with chronic, incurable dyspepsia, all brought about by the habitual use of cayenne and its condimental cousins.
The usual history of these victims is, that they began by over-feeding, took the condiment to force the stomach to do more than its healthful amount of work, using but a little at first. Then the stomach became tolerant of this little, and demanded more; then more, and more, and more, until at last inflammation, ulceration, torpidity, and finally the death of the digestive powers, accompanied with all that long train of miseries to which I have referred. India is their special fatherland. Englishmen, accustomed to an active life at home, and a climate demanding much fuel-food for the maintenance of animal heat, go to India, crammed, maybe, with Latin, but ignorant of the laws of health; cheap servants promote indolence, tropical heat diminishes respiratory oxidation, and the appetite naturally fails.
Instead of understanding this failure as an admonition to take smaller quantities of food, or food of less nutritive and combustive value, such as carbohydrates instead of hydrocarbons and albumenoids, they regard it as a symptom of ill-health, and take curries, bitter ale, and other tonics or appetising condiments, which, however mischievous in England, are far more so there.
I know several men who have lived rationally in India, and they all agree that the climate is especially favourable to longevity, provided bitter beer, and all other alcoholic drinks, all peppery condiments, and flesh foods are avoided. The most remarkable example of vigorous old age I have ever met was a retired colonel eighty-two years of age, who had risen from the ranks, and had been fifty-five years in India without furlough; drunk no alcohol during that period; was a vegetarian in India, though not so in his native land. I guessed his age to be somewhere about sixty. He was a Scotchman, and an ardent student of the works of both George and Dr. Andrew Combe.