Domestic medicine or The family medical adviser : a manual of health. With recipes.

Date:
1843
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Domestic medicine or The family medical adviser : a manual of health. With recipes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    some food is also the cheapest; simple fare, avoiding indi¬ gestible articles, where the frame is weak, and, in all cases, moderate in quantity, will give the greatest chance of escape from those disorders that always follow in the train of excess. Water is a much better beverage than either ale or beer for those whose labour or exhausted strength does not require stimulants. The ale and porter of com¬ merce, particularly the latter, are seldom sufficiently free from adulteration to be taken in any quantity without bad effects on the system. Exercise is the very life of life ; it is that which will enable us to live in confined and un¬ healthy places, and to eat coarse or almost indigestible food with impunity. For a confirmation of the importance of exercise, let us only cast our eyes over two portions of our female population,—those who from their wealth need not, or from idle or mistaken elegance of manners do not, take sufficient exercise ; and again at the poor females whose subsistence is to be earned by their needle, or similar sedentary employments, which, by confining them a great many hours, leave neither time nor inclination for healthy out-door exercise. To the former class we say,— Walk, ride, dance on your lawns, or run races with your brothers and sisters, so you but take exercise to absolute fatigue every day, and you will lose a whole host of small ailments,—headaches, nervousness, languor, and loss of appetite, often ending in that most fatal of all complaints, consumption. But what shall we say to the other class of unfortunate females, who, labouring perhaps sixteen hours a-day in a close and over-heated workroom, when they leave are only fit for that bed from which they have again so early to rise and renew their toil ? Our advice is this :—Reside at as great a distance from your workshop as you can by any possibility manage to walk, morning and night, to and from. You will say you are too “ tired to walk but we say, walk, and you will feel rested, renovated. It will be the means, the only means in your unhappy circumstances, to preserve your health. The same may be said to the whole host of clerks, &c., who are mostly wise enough to reside a few miles from town, but who, within the last few years, many of them, at least, contrive to defeat the good they might reap from this arrangement by availing themselves of those ever ready vehicles of transit, the city omnibuses. To these it