Diet and food considered in relation to strength and power of endurance, training and athletics / by Alexander Haig.

  • Haig, Alexander, 1853-1924.
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Diet and food considered in relation to strength and power of endurance, training and athletics / by Alexander Haig. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

    110/122
    and afterwards depressants ; they first unnecessarily call out the reserves and then plunge all into depres- sion and feeble nutrition, by blocking the circulation, and while this is going on other stimulants, as alcohol and tobacco, or tea, have to be called in to keep things going. (See also p. 37.) It follows that the only way to get clear of stimu- lants is to give them up altogether; if you keep on any of them you must be led to take more and more, and gradually to add others which are more powerful. On the other hand, to live on one's income, to have one's reserves entire and untouched for that evil day of trial which is sure to come to all, to work calmly and steadily without fuss and without friction is alone sufficient to make life worth living; and so great is the difference between physiological solvency and physiological bankruptcy, that I do not exaggerate when I say that the knowledge of how to attain to the former has repaid me a thousand times over for all the time and trouble expended on experiments. Then again, the physiologically solvent know to the full the joys of a strong and useful life, while the bankrupt knows these joys but once, in the memory of what he was before he began to call on his reserves, and as these reserves get smaller and smaller, the stimulants, and even the more powerful ones, such as morphine and cocaine, which he eventually calls in, fail ever more and more to