Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/459

Rh scrofula and other forms of tuberculosis began to prevail among them, and have attained a degree of prevalence even greater than among the poorest people in Ireland, where the staple food is of the same kind, but beneficially supplemented to a considerable extent by the use of buttermilk.

Moreover, I have observed among people in the tropics, as well as in temperate latitudes, that there is a marked difference in the health of persons whose chief food is farinaceous, between those who but rarely eat anything else and are particularly feeble, lymphatic and scrofulous, and those who eat butter or oil with their rice and similar food, or supplement it with sardines in oil, or oil-dressed salads.

Recurring to what I have remarked on the superiority of meat that retain the blood as well as the fat, every epicure knows, and every physician ought to know, that the meat of animals of every kind so killed as to retain the blood is more delicious than that of animals otherwise killed. It is also more digestible and more nutritious. All fresh meat is more or less acid, and that from which the blood has been drained requires to be kept until alkalinity is induced by incipient decomposition before it becomes tender and digestible. On the contrary, that which retains the blood only requires thorough cooling before it is ready for cooking and is tender and digestible from the outset, because the alkalinity of the blood speedily acts upon and neutralizes the acid. Hence, the meat of the buffalo, as it used to be killed and prepared by the North American Indians; the jerked beef of the Gauchos; the beef of cattle that have been knocked in the head, or preferably, by dividing the spinal marrow in the neck, as now practised in the abattoirs of Chicago (if it is not afterward drained of its blood), is greatly superior to that which is prepared after the method of the Jews. Besides, the draining or soaking away of the blood from meat impairs its nutritive value. The blood is essentially of the same composition as the flesh, but besides, it holds in solution phosphates of soda, salts of potash, iron and sulphates; all nutritives of vital importance to the human economy. But there is no method of slaughtering animals that entirely divests the flesh of blood, hence to attempt to prohibit eating it, to be effective, should prohibit the eating of meat altogether.

Relative exemption from tuberculosis, under all circumstances, is, according to my observation, due to the generous use and potentiality of fat food. My conclusion in this regard is fortified by many years' observation and study of the liability to consumption of people collectively, families and individuals, more or less proportional to their abstinence from fat foods. The most prominent example, of which I have never lost sight from youth up, is the negro race in America. I began my professional life among them when they were slaves and