Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/743

Rh poisons, for every trifling complaint. Constipation is often simply a transient lassitude of the system, a functional tardiness caused by fatigue and perspiration, and very apt to cure itself in the course of two or three days, especially at a change from a higher to a lower temperature. After the third day the disorder demands a change of regimen: cold ablutions, lighter bedclothes, in summer-time removal of the bed to the coolest and airiest available locality, and liberal rations of the most digestible food—bran-bread, sweet cold milk, stewed prunes, and fresh fruit in any desired quantity; faute de mieux, cold water and sugar, oatmeal-gruel, and diluted molasses. The legumina, in all their combinations, are likewise very efficient bowel regulators, and common pea-soup is a remedial equivalent of Du Barry's expensive "revalenta Arabica" (lentil-powder). For real dyspepsia (rarely a chronic disease of youngsters in their teens), there is hardly any help but rough out-door exercise, daily pedestrian exercise or out-door labor, continued for hours in all kinds of weather. The Graham starvation cure might bring relief in the course of time, but for one person with passive heroism enough to resist the continual cravings of an abnormal appetite, hundreds can muster the requisite resolution for an occasional active effort, which will gradually but perceptibly restore the vigor of the system. Drugs only change the form of the disease by turning a confirmed surfeit-habit into a still more obstinate and less commutable alcohol-habit; the vile mixtures sold under the name of "tonic" bitters have never benefited anybody but their proprietors and the rum-sellers, to whose army of victims the patent-medicine dispensaries serve as so many recruiting-offices.

Active exercise is also the only remedy for those secret vices whose causes are as often misunderstood as their consequences. The pathologists who ascribe precocious prurience to the effects of a stimulating diet seem to overlook the fact that the most continent nations of antiquity, the Scythians and ancient Germans, were as nearly exclusively carnivorous as our Indian hunting-tribes, the apathy of whose sexual instincts has been alleged in explanation of their gradual extinction. For the same reason the gauchos of the tropical pampas are an unprolific race, while the Russian mujiks and the sluggish boyars of the Danubian principalities are as salacious as the inert (though frugivorous) natives of southern Italy. Independent of climate and diet, the continence or incontinence of the different nations, or different classes of any nation, bears an unmistakable proportion to the degree of their indolence. Lazy cities and small, thickly populated islands (Lesbos, Paphos, Cythera, Otaheite) have been most conspicuous for the absence of those virtues which the Grecian allegory ascribed to the goddess of the chase. The menu prescribed by the founders of the monastic orders was rather ultra-Grahamite in quality and quantity, yet neither barley-bread nor the frequent fasts to aid the