The organic laws, or, The laws which govern the human organism / by J. Bradford Sax.

  • Sax, J. Bradford.
Date:
1851
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The organic laws, or, The laws which govern the human organism / by J. Bradford Sax. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    strong is the stimulating property of flesh, that under certain cir- cumstances it will actually produce intoxication. Dr. Thompson, of Glasgow, in a work recently published by him, records several instances of intoxication produced by animal food. One of the cases was as follows :—While an army surgeon in India, he ob- tained some extra service of some Hindoo soldiers, by promising them a ram for dinner, an acceptable present for them, who rarely tasted animal food. The mutton being roasted, and greedily de- voured by them, produced all the symptoms of intoxication,—put- ting some to sleep, making others stagger, and others talk exces- sively, and play the usual pranks of ebriety. I have myself expe- rienced this intoxicating effect of flesh-meat, to some extent; but where it is used habitually, it is not felt. It is just so with tobacco. The feverish excitement attending the digestion of flesh, produced by its stimulating property, has been called by medical writers the fever of digestion. Now as flesh-meat is more stimulating to the system, in propor- tion to the nourishment which it affords, than pure vegetable ali- ment is, so all the processes of digestion, assimilation, and nutrition, in the use of the former, are more rapid, and attended with a greater expenditure of vital power and waste of organized substance, than in the use of the latter. The flesh-meat in the stomach, the chyme formed from it in the alimentary cavity, the chyle in the lacteals, the blood in the heart, veins, and capillaries, and all the fluids and substances elaborated from the blood, are more exciting to the parts on which they severally act, and cause a greater intensity and rapidity of vital action and expenditure of vitality in the whole system, than is effected by alimentation, digestion, and nutrition in the use of pure and proper vegetable food. And hence the well known fact, that in the most healthy and robust men who have been accustomed to a pure vegetable and water diet from infancy, the skin is uniformly much cooler, and the pulse is slower from ten to thirty beats in a minute, than in those who subsist on a mixed diet, in the ordinary manner of civic life. We see, therefore, that the use of flesh-meat must cause a prodi- gious waste of the fund nf life, and consequently, even if there is ao disease produced, greatly shorten our lives. It will wear out ar exhaust the vitality of the stomach and other organs, long before