Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/618

600 present method is so little of an improvement that the patients of a future century would probably prefer to resume the Whitehall pilgrimages. Instead of ventilating our houses and abolishing our sauerkraut (the long-notorious cachexia of the ill-housed and ill-fed classes having sufficiently indicated the cause of the malady), we suppress the morbid symptoms by sarsaparilla, iodide of potassium, or patent "medicines": only reliable liver-pills and infallible blood-purifiers—in other words, we believe that the cure of a common disease depends upon the accidental or providentially ordained discovery of some mysterious compound. The bottom error is the same as in the king's-evil delusion, and can be easily traced to the radical fallacy of our speculative dogmas; we still regard sin and disease as something normal, aboriginal, and unavoidable, and expect salvation from mysterious, extra-natural remedies, while the truth of the very contrary is becoming more and more evident, namely, that all evil, including moral and physical unsoundness, is due, and generally traceable, to wholly abnormal causes, and (those causes being removed) recovery the effect of the self-acting and self-regulating laws of Nature. The removal of the cause is a remedy which the sufferers from almost any disease might prescribe for themselves, and here especially: fresh air and abstinence from indigestible food, particularly pickles and fat meat. Pork is not the only unwholesome kind of animal food, for Jews are not exempt from scrofula, and were formerly subject to a still worse skin-disease; and, if we had not forgotten the art of interpreting the language of our instincts, we would not overlook the significancy of the circumstance that ninety-nine per cent, of all young children detest every kind of fat meat except in the form of taste-deceiving ragouts. Farmer-boys, who have to share the out-door labors of their parents, can eat with comparative impunity many things which only the hardiest of their city comrades can digest: pork, greasy and pickled cabbages, fritters, and salt beef. Even young Hottentots could not eat such stuff without being sooner or later the worse for it, whenever the counteracting hardships of a savage life alternate with a period of physical inactivity. But children afflicted with cachectic symptoms should at once be restricted to a wholly vegetable and non-stimulating diet—farinaceous preparations, boiled legumina, and, if possible, ripe, sweet fruit.

The summer diet of a scrofulous child can not be too frugal, in the ancient sense of the word, and, where a supply of ripe tree-fruits can be easily obtained, I should think it the best plan to dispense altogether with made dishes—for a while, even with farinaceous dishes. Parents who have no hesitation in cramming their children with salt pork, beer, and sauerkraut, would shudder at the idea of feeding them on fruit alone, yet the happiest of all visitors to the southern Rhineland are probably the patients of a Swabian Trauben-Kur, where dyspeptics, etc., are fed almost exclusively—often for days together quite exclusively—on ripe, sweet grapes. Combined with plenty of exercise