Indigestion: its causes, consequences, and treatment : with copious observations on dietetics / by R.J. Culverwell.

  • Culverwell, Robert James, 1802-1852.
Date:
1833
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Indigestion: its causes, consequences, and treatment : with copious observations on dietetics / by R.J. Culverwell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    79/120 (page 69)
    meals that increases the bane. Many a man will, at nine in the morning, eat a hearty breakfast of hot tea and a plentiful supply of rolls, or new bread half- drowned in butter; at t^velve swallow a mutton-chop and its usual appendages ; at three or four sit formally down to a dinner composed of all kinds of messes, both solid and fluid, and all at once rise up indignant and astounded, that he is troubled with stomach-pains, and head-aches, and flatulency, and eructations, and all the usual concomitants of a fit of indigestion ! And it is in this state that he flies for succour to medicine in one or other of its most popular forms. It must,be clear that where the stomach is incapable of digesting food of the easiest solution, in cases of or- dinary health, it cannot be much improved by the action of medicines, which are at all times revolting. The original cause of the disease once removed, unassisted nature is the best physician in almost all cases. The presence of innutritions, and consequently offensive sub- stances, can only serve to irritate anew an already irri- tated organ. Costiveness, for instance, is one of the commonest symptoms of dyspepsia, and the patient, mistaking t\\esympto7n for a complaint, too frequently has recourse to violent purgatives to relieve it. llie medicine thus presented to jiarts already in a state of high morbid sensibility, actually aggravates instead of ameliorating the symptom, and although so far it fulfils its designed purpose, the irritability is increased, the complaint