Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/385

Rh however, one class of such remedies which are directly connected with the chemistry of cookery. I refer to the condiments that act as "tonics," excluding common salt, which is an article of food, though often miscalled a condiment. It is food simply because it supplies the blood with one of its normal and necessary constituents, chloride of sodium, without which we can not live. A certain quantity of it exists in most of our ordinary food, but not always sufficient.

Cayenne pepper may be selected as a typical example of a condiment properly so called. Mustard is a food and condiment combined; this is the case with some others. Curry-powders are mixtures of very potent condiments with more or less of farinaceous materials, and sulphur compounds, which, like the oil of mustard, of onions, garlic, etc., may have a certain amount of nutritive value.

The mere condiment is a stimulating drug that does its work directly upon the inner lining of the stomach, by exciting it to increased and abnormal activity. A dyspeptic may obtain immediate relief by using cayenne pepper. Among the advertised patent medicines is a pill bearing the very ominous name of its compounder, the active constituent of which is cayenne. Great relief and temporary comfort are commonly obtained by using it as a "dinner-pill." If thus used only as a temporary remedy for an acute and temporary, or exceptional, attack of indigestion, all is well, but the cayenne, whether taken in pills or dusted over the food or stewed with it in curries or any otherwise, is one of the most cruel of slow poisons when taken habitually. Thousands of poor wretches are crawling miserably toward their graves, the victims of the multitude of maladies of both mind and body that are connected with chronic, incurable dyspepsia, all brought about by the habitual use of cayenne and its condimental cousins.

The usual history of these victims is that they began by overfeeding, took the condiment to force the stomach to do more than its healthful amount of work, using but a little at first. Then the stomach became tolerant of this little, and demanded more; then more, and more, and more, until at last inflammation, ulceration, torpidity, and finally the death of the digestive powers, accompanied with all that long train of miseries to which I have referred. India is their special fatherland. Englishmen, accustomed to an active life at home, and a climate demanding much food-fuel for the maintenance of animal heat, go to India, crammed, may be, with Latin, but ignorant of the laws of health; cheap servants promote indolence, tropical heat diminishes respiratory oxidation, and the appetite naturally fails. Instead of understanding this failure as an admonition to take smaller quantities of food, or food of less nutritive value, they regard it as a symptom of ill-health, and take curries, bitter ale, and other tonics or appetizing condiments, which, however mischievous in England, are far more so there.

I know several men who have lived rationally in India, and they all