A treatise on food and diet : with observations on the dietetical regimen suited for disordered states of the digestive organs : and an account of the dietaries of some of the principal metropolitan and other establishments for paupers, lunatics, criminals, children, the sick, &c / by Jonathan Pereira ; edited by Charles A. Lee.

  • Pereira, Jonathan, 1804-1853.
Date:
1843
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on food and diet : with observations on the dietetical regimen suited for disordered states of the digestive organs : and an account of the dietaries of some of the principal metropolitan and other establishments for paupers, lunatics, criminals, children, the sick, &c / by Jonathan Pereira ; edited by Charles A. Lee. 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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    PREFACE. The idea of the present treatise occurred to the author during the preparation of an- other work, when he repeatedly experienced the want of a detailed and individual account of alimentary substances. His original intention was to have treated the subject in the same full and systematic manner that he has elsewhere done the articles of the Materia Medica ; and he had, in fact, begun to collect materials for a work on this plan. But he soon found that the sub- ject was too extensive to be treated in such a way; within, at least, reasonable limits. He was, therefore, compelled to abandon, though with considerable reluctance, his original design, and to substitute for it the present work, in which he has excluded all Natural Historical details; preferring this course to that of giving a mere sketch or epitome of the subject. The present treatise on Diet differs from its predecessors in several particulars, some of which it may not be useless to point out. In the first place, it contains a tolerably full account of the chemical elements of food,— a subject which has always appeared to the author of considerable importance, and to which the recent researches and conclusions of Boussingault, Liebig, and Dumas have given additional interest It is one, however, which preceding dietetical writers have al- together passed over, or only incidentally alluded to; and in no work, with which he is acquainted, has it been systematically treated. Another peculiarity of the present work is the increased space devoted to the considera- tion of alimentary principles, the number of which the author, for reasons he has else- where assigned, has considered it proper to augment. The plan of separately considering Alimentary Principles and Compound Aliments, adopted from Tiedemann,* he considers to be greatly superior to the ordinary method of treating these subjects, and which consists in the arrangement of foods according to the proximate or immediate principle predominating in their composition. Such a classifica- tion is open to the glaring and obvious objection, that most of the foods in ordinary use consist of several alimentary principles. Thus, butchers' meat consists of fibrine, albumen, gelatine, and fat; bread, of starch, gluten, gum, and sugar; milk, of caseine, butter, and sugar. Now, to arrange meat among fibrinous, bread among starchy, and milk among caseous, foods, is to overlook the other important constituents of these substances, and to give a very imperfect view of their alimentary properties. The author did not venture, without considerable hesitation and doubt as to its pro- priety, to deviate from Dr. Prout's beautifully simple and generally admitted classification of alimentary principles, into the aqueous, the saccharine, the albuminous, and the oleagin- ous. After mature consideration, however, he satisfied himself of the impossibility of reducing all nutritive principles to these four heads. Common salt, for example, which a recent writerf justly observes, can by no means be considered only as a luxury, but as * Unfersuchungen iiber das Nahrungs-BediirfnUs den Nahrungs-Trieb und die Nahrungs-Mitlel des Menschen. Darmstadt, 1836.