[1]
[Sidenote: Intelligent cravings of particular sick for particular
articles of diet.]
In the diseases produced by bad food, such as scorbutic dysentery and
diarrhoea, the patient's stomach often craves for and digests things,
some of which certainly would be laid down in no dietary that ever was
invented for sick, and especially not for such sick. These are fruit,
pickles, jams, gingerbread, fat of ham or bacon, suet, cheese, butter,
milk. These cases I have seen not by ones, nor by tens, but by hundreds.
And the patient's stomach was right and the book was wrong. The articles
craved for, in these cases, might have been principally arranged under
the two heads of fat and vegetable acids.
There is often a marked difference between men and women in this matter
of sick feeding. Women's digestion is generally slower.
[2]
It is made a frequent recommendation to persons about to incur great
exhaustion, either from the nature of the service, or from their being
not in a state fit for it, to eat a piece of bread before they go. I
wish the recommenders would themselves try the experiment of
substituting a piece of bread for a cup of tea or coffee, or beef-tea,
as a refresher. They would find it a very poor comfort. When soldiers
have to set out fasting on fatiguing duty, when nurses have to go
fasting in to their patients, it is a hot restorative they want, and
ought to have, before they go, not a cold bit of bread. And dreadful
have been the consequences of neglecting this. If they can take a bit of
bread _with_ the hot cup of tea, so much the better, but not _instead_
of it. The fact that there is more nourishment in bread than in almost
anything else, has probably induced the mistake. That it is a fatal
mistake, there is no doubt. It seems, though very little is known on the
subject, that what "assimilates" itself directly, and with the least
trouble of digestion with the human body, is the best for the above
circumstances. Bread requires two or three processes of assimilation,
before it becomes like the human body.
The almost universal testimony of English men and women who have
undergone great fatigue, such as riding long journeys without stopping,
or sitting up for several nights in succession, is that they could do it
best upon an occasional cup of tea--and nothing else.
Let experience, not theory, decide upon this as upon all other things.
[3]
In making coffee, it is absolutely necessary to buy it in the berry and
grind it at home. Otherwise you may reckon upon its containing a certain
amount of chicory, _at least_. This is not a question of the taste, or
of the wholesomeness of chicory. It is that chicory has nothing at all
of the properties for which you give coffee. And therefore you may as
well not give it.
Again, all laundresses, mistresses of dairy-farms, head nurses, (I speak
of the good old sort only--women who unite a good deal of hard manual
labour with the head-work necessary for arranging the day's business, so
that none of it shall tread upon the heels of something else,) set great
value, I have observed, upon having a high-priced tea. This is called
extravagant. But these women are "extravagant" in nothing else. And they
are right in this. Real tea-leaf tea alone contains the restorative they
want; which is not to be found in sloe-leaf tea.
The mistresses of houses, who cannot even go over their own house once a
day, are incapable of judging for these women. For they are incapable
themselves, to all appearance, of the spirit of arrangement (no small
task) necessary for managing a large ward or dairy.