Food and feeding / by Sir Henry Thompson. With an appendix.

Thompson, Henry, Sir, bart., 1820-1904.

Date:: 1894

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Food and feeding / by Sir Henry Thompson. With an appendix. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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/neans frequent indisposi- tion ; most com- plaints so caused. adult, and moreover obtains for him, percbance, liis little share of tea, or even of beer or gin. On the whole, perhaps he is not much worse off than the child of the well-to-do, who becomes a pet, and is already familiarised with complex and too solid forms of food, as well as with stimulating drinks, which cus- tom and self-indulgence have placed on the daily table. And soon afterwards commence in conse- quence—and entirely in consequence, a fact it is im- possible too much to emphasize—the “sick head- aches” and “bilious attacks,” which pursue their victim through half a lifetime, to be exchanged for gout or worse at or before the grand climacteric. And so common are these evils that they are regarded by people in general as a necessary appanage of “ poor humanity,” and together with measles or hooj)ing cough, to be part of the natural development of the full grown and complete man! No notion can be more erroneous, since it is absolutely true that the complaints referred to are self-engendered, form no necessary part of our physical nature, and for their existence are dependent almost entirely on our habits in relation to food and drink. I except, of course, those cases in which hereditary tendency is so strong as to produce these evils, despite some care on the part of the unfortunate victim of an ancestor’s self- indulgence. Equally, however, on the part of that little-to-be-revercd progenitor was ill-chosen food, or more probably an excessive indulgence in quantity, the cause of his disease, and not the physical nature of man.