The foundations of nutrition / by Mary Swartz Rose.

  • Rose, Mary Swartz, 1874-1941.
Date:
[1927], ©1927
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The foundations of nutrition / by Mary Swartz Rose. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    23/526 (page 3)
    therefore require the most food, for otherwise their bodies are wasted. In old persons the heat is feeble and therefore they require little fuel, as it were, to the flame for it would be extinguished by much.” (Apho- rism 14.) 1 But Hippocrates and his successors for two thousand years accounted for the disappearance of food as “insensible perspiration ” and“heat” without any real under- standing of what either term meant. In 1614 a. d. a univer- sity professor with a prac- tical turn of mind devised a chair connected with a steelyard to weigh him- self before and after meals, so that he might find out the amount of this “insensible perspira- tion,” for he said: “He only who knows how much and when the body does more or less insen- sibly perspire will be able to discern when or what is to be added or taken away, either for the recovery or the preservation of health.” (Aphorism 3.) 2 Even Sanctorius’s painstaking efforts did not solve the mys- tery because in his day there was no science of chem- Fig. 2.—Sanctorius on the steelyard which he devised to weigh himself be- fore and after meals. 1 Adams, Francis. Genuine Works of Hippocrates, page 197. William Wood and Co. (1891). 2 Lusk, Graham. Science of Nutrition, 3d edition, page 18. W. B. Saunders Co. (19-17)-