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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    danger is probably averted. But yet, a wide margin must be allowed for discretionary modification according to circum- stances which the immediate administrators of victualling' arrangements alone can observe. Still more necessary is modification according to circum- stances required, when we come to deal with individuals instead of masses. When the tailor in Laputa sternly refused to take the usual measurements, and insisted on constructing Captain Gulliver’s coat, waistcoat, and breeches on abstract principles, the customer vowed it was the worst suit of clothes he ever had in his life. We should certainly fail in the same way if we did not take the measure of numberless contin- gencies in the daily life, and numberless peculiarities in the persons of those who consult us about their diet and I’egimen, or who are (like the inmates of prisons) actually dependent upon us for living at all. Even healthy persons are not absolutely perfect in the performance of all their functions, and a good deal of the food swallowed escapes digestion and is wasted among the excreta. A considerable margin must be allowed for that. And different forms of food and different preparations of those forms are suited, from their mere mechanical construc- tion, to different constitutions of body. A diet which in an old man may be wasted from lack of solution, and which would therefore be a starvation diet to him, may in a young man be richly ample. On the other hand, the easily soluble, but scanty diet on which the old man might flourish, would not suffice for his active, growing grandson. Then again, very different lives are necessarily led by different men, and even by the same man at various times, and variations in the mere quantity of food, at the instigation of appetite, are not sufficient to accommodate the diet to the work. Brain-wort, body-work, in-door work, and out-door work, all introduce modifications in the daily requirements of the nutritive organs. There are also physiological drains upon the constitution, such as that felt by a nursing mother, and pathological drains, such