A treatise on diet : with a view to establish, on practical grounds, a system of rules, for the prevention and cure of the diseases incident to a disordered state of the digestive functions / by J.A. Paris.

  • Paris, John Ayrton, 1785-1856.
Date:
1827
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on diet : with a view to establish, on practical grounds, a system of rules, for the prevention and cure of the diseases incident to a disordered state of the digestive functions / by J.A. Paris. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

    144/430 (page 124)
    THE NECESSITV OF A MIXED pletion. Adults and old persons comparatively require but a small proportion of aliment, unless the nutritive movement be accelerated by violent exercise and hard labour. 111. Those who advocate the exclusive value of animal food, and deny the utility of its admixture with vegetable matter, adduce in proof of their system the rude health and Herculean strength of our hardy ancestors. The British aborigines, when first visited by the Romans, certainly do not appear to have been conversant with the cultivation of the ground, and, according to the early writers, Caesar, Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, and others, their principal subsistence was on flesh and milk; but before any valid conclusion can be deduced from this circumstance, the habits of the people must be compared with those of their descendants. The history of later times will fur- nish us with a satisfactory answer to those who deny the necessity of vegetable aliment. We learn from the London bills, that scurvy raged to such an excess in the seventeenth century as to have occasioned a very great mortality: at this period the art of gardening had not long been introduced. It appears that the most common articles of the kitchen garden, such as cabbages, were not culti- vated in England until the reign of Catharine of Arragon ; indeed, we are told that this queen could not procure a salad until a gardener was sent for from the Netherlands to raise it. Since the change