For consumption, the old-fogy treatment by squills, ipecac, laudanum, and
the host of expectorants, is worthless. One of the fatalities in this
disease has been the sticking to these useless medicines by a certain
class of physicians and patients.
Use no tobacco. If tight-lacing and confined habits, as want of air and
exercise, have been conducive to the development of consumption in
females, more repulsive habits have led to catarrhal affections,
destruction of the vitality, and finally to consumption in many of the
opposite sex. Does the mother, by habits which injure her health,
jeopardize the life and health of her offspring? The husband and father,
by the debasing and health-destroying habit of tobacco-using, injures both
mother and child. The description which I have given in the article on
tobacco, respecting cleansing the young man, and purifying him fit for
society, is no joke! The clothes, skin, blood, muscle, and bones,--even
the seminal fluid,--of the confirmed tobacco-user, all are impregnated
with tobacco poison. Does any one question but something of this virus is
transmitted to the offspring? Further, I have known many a wife to become
tobacco-diseased,--nervous, yellow, sick at the stomach, dyspeptic,
neuralgic, etc.,--suffering untold horrors, from lying, night after night,
during year in and year out, beside a great, filthy, tobacco-plant of a
husband!
Perhaps some sensitive gentleman--user of the weed of course--may object
to my way of putting it. Sound truths, like sound meat, require no
mincing. We know that children, sleeping constantly with elderly people,
become prematurely old and infirm. We know also that nurses and others,
sleeping with perpetual invalids, imbibe their diseases. The skin of the
tobacco-user is continually giving off the tobacco poison--_nicotine_--and
the more susceptible skin of the female, or child, by its absorbent
powers, is as continually taking in this poison. There are many
tobacco-users, who, if they knew this fact, would for this reason, if no
other, abandon the injurious and sinful habit; would not want to continue
a habit--be it never so slavish--which, aside from its injury to
themselves, was destroying the health and lives of his wife and his
children.
Tobacco exhausts the saliva, the fluids, the blood, often the muscle, _and
destroys the recuperative powers of the human system_. It weakens the
power of the heart. Nine tenths of the reported deaths from "heart
disease" really originate, or result directly from the effects of
tobacco-using. And, finally, it destroys the good effects of nearly all
medicines. I positively affirm that no patient afflicted with a chronic
disease can recover by the use of medicines if he continues the excessive
use of tobacco.
I think these are good and conclusive reasons why one should not use that
pernicious weed--tobacco.
Avoid all excesses, particularly of coition. Consumptives should husband
all their resources. One other way of doing this is to keep from wasting
the breath and caloric of the system through the mouth. Again, I say,
breathe only through the nostrils. Keep out of crowded and unventilated
halls, school-rooms, churches, and houses. Air! air and sunshine! don't
forget them.
Avoid patent medicines. They are worthless. Even if one in a thousand were
adapted to the _disease_ in question, it might not be to the peculiar
constitution of the invalid.
People are so differently constituted that one kind of food, clothing, or
medicine cannot be adapted to all. I wish that I could tell every reader
of these pages what remedies are adapted to persons suffering from not
only consumption, but from a hundred other diseases. But it is impossible,
as intimated in the fore part of this chapter. Not only the quality of a
medicine suited to one constitution may not be at all suited to another,
but the quantity is even as uncertain. It requires much knowledge and long
experience in the disease, and its various peculiarities, as also of the
varied constitution and idiosyncrasies of different patients, in order to
prescribe successfully.
As the majority of the readers of this work are predisposed to
consumption, let them seek to prevent its development in their systems.
The writer has done this; he has told you in plain terms how it was done,
how it still can be; but it is you who must believe in and abide by these
instructions. Do this, and you will scarcely require to obtain and retain
the knowledge of a thousand remedies and a complete knowledge of yourself,
which it requires a lifetime of practice and study to possess.
Dr. Worcester Beach, of New York, in one of his botanical works, tells of
a country-woman who, having been given up as incurable with consumption,
gathered and boiled together all the different kinds of herbs and barks
which she could find upon the farm, and making this decoction into a
syrup, drank of it freely, and was cured thereby! I would not recommend
this empirical sort of practice, but quote it to show the uncertainty of
what medicine was adapted to the case.
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