A manual of diet in health and disease / by Thomas King Chambers.

Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A manual of diet in health and disease / by Thomas King Chambers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    of food by which we can expect to get niost work out of men and beasts ; we have found the cause of many of our failures in distributing victuals; and we have learnt how to avoid much cruelty and injustice that our fathers unknowingly per- petrated. It may be reckoned from experimental calculations, too long to be inserted here, that the expenditure of force in working the machinery of the body—in raising the diaphragm about fifteen times, and contracting the heart about sixty times, a minute; in continuously rolling the wave of the intestinal canal; and in various other involuntary and voluntary move- ments which cannot be avoided even by a mere cumberer of the ground, without doing anything that can be called work— it may be reckoned that the expenditure of force in doing this is equal to that which would raise a man of ten stone 10,000 ft. But a man cannot even pick oakum without expending more force and requiring more to support it. A prisoner on penal diet has half as much again. There are several reasons for believing that in assigning their physiological functions to the several sorts of food, we should ascribe nearly all the business of giving birth to force to the solid hydrocarbons, starch and fat, by their conversion into carbonic acid, just as we have good grounds for thinking that it is the conversion of the solid hydrocarbon, coal, into carbonic acid, which drives our locomotives. It is not neces- sary to be acquainted with every step of the process, winch, in the body, we confessedly are not, to appreciate the argument. To the nitrogenous aliments seems allotted the task of con- tinuously replacing the wear and tear of the nitrogenous tissues. Flesh food, or that which comes near it in nitrogen- ous contents, after a few changes replaces the lost flesh which has passed away in excretions; and thus the engineer takes iron ore, makes it into wrought plates or steel, and renews the corroded boiler-plate or worn piston-rod. One of the most cogent of these reasons is that the chief nitrogen-holding excretion, the urea, is little, if at all, increased in quantity by