Volume 1

A treatise on diet and regimen / by William Henry Robertson.

Date:
1847-1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on diet and regimen / by William Henry Robertson. 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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    the system with carbon. Such diet is necessarily more wanted by the sedentary than the active;— more wanted after the years of growth are completed than during those years. In laborious lives, the constant expenditure caused by muscular exercise may well nigh furnish carbon enough for the pur- poses of respiration from the expenditure of tissue, and the diet might, perhaps, consist almost exclu- sively of nitrogenised substances. An inactive life would have been almost impossible, without the aid of such food as ministers exclusively to the respira- tory process; and man must have laboured not only for his pleasures, or for his daily sustenance, but for the expenditure of so much of his own frame-work as would furnish the carbon necessary to maintain the temperature of his body; and this would be still more the case, when, inadequately clothed and not warmly housed, his surface, at least in the colder latitudes, would be exposed to much and rapid loss of temperature, by day and night,—rendering a life of almost unceasing exertion, a necessity of existence. Thus, step by step, has man, in his successive genera- tions, earned for himself the power of maintaining his elevated temperature, with longer intervals of repose and quiet,—the power of making his body subserve more and more the purposes of its great tenant,— the poAver of devoting life to intellectual pursuits, of expanding and elevating the nobler capabilities of his nature. It is indeed curious, and an abundant cause for wonder and gratitude, to contrast the barbarous inhabitant of the colder latitudes, living