An answer to the enquiry, If it be the duty of every person to study the preservation of his health, what means are the most likely to answer that end, and to which recourse may be had by all classes of people? / by Disney Alexander ...

Date:
1804
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An answer to the enquiry, If it be the duty of every person to study the preservation of his health, what means are the most likely to answer that end, and to which recourse may be had by all classes of people? / by Disney Alexander ... 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, seldom fails to shorten the natural dumtion of Jife._ Equally prejudicial to health are the hearty suppers with which some people indulge themselves, previous to their retiring to rest. At this protracted period of the day, the muscular powers of the stomach, as well as those of the whole body, have suffered considerable exhaustion; and require rest before they can recover their susceptibility of action. Three meals in a day are as many as nature requires, and as the stomach can sufficiently digest. Dinner ought to form the chief of these; and those persons who, after eating heartily of animal food in the middle of the day, habituate themselves to meat suppers, we commonly fiird complaining of disagreeable eructations, disturbed sleep, and a total inaptitude for food the following morning. Hence the ancient distich, more remarkable, we must allow, for its truth than its poetry : fix magn& caena, stomacho fit maxima psna: “ Ut sis nocte levis, sit tibi caena brevis.”'* With respect to the quality of our food, nature itself dictates to us, that It should consist of a due proportion of animal and vegetable matter. All substances containing much jelly, whether animal or vegetable, are nourishing: this alone affords nutriment, whilst the hard, watery, and saline particles' cannot be assimilated or converted into chyle. A diet wholly consisting of animal substances might, from the quantity of nourislunent they contain, be supposed to be most conformable to nature; but as our appetite gone- * Great suppers a very great evil \ve call, That your sleep may be sound, let your supper be small.