Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 July 1878 — Hygiene and Consumption. [ARTICLE]

Hygiene and Consumption.

At the tables of how many farmers and mechanics, we wonder, is the buckwheat breakfast gone into disgrace? We readily recall the time when uncounted multitudes of families broke their fast of twelve hours and faced the work of a blustering winter day with nothing but greasy buckwheat cakes and molasses ! They might almost as well have eaten sawdust; and what had they for dinner ? Boiled salt pork and potatoes, and for supper boiled salt pork and potatoes again—cold, and made palatable with vinegar ! Ah, we forget the pie—the everlasting pie, with its sugary center and leathery crust—the one titillation of the palate that made life tolerable. Good bread and bult ror milk, abundant fruit, beef, or mutton, nutritious puddings—all these things have been within the reach of the people of New England, for they have always been the thriftiest people in the world ; but they have cost something, and they have not really been deemed necessary. The people have not realized that what they regarded as luxuries were necessaries, and that the food upon which they have depended for protection from the climate, and for the repair of the wastes of labor, has been altogether inadequate, and has left them with impoverished blood and tuberculous lungs. After taking into account all the influence of heredity, which is made much of in treating of the causes of phthisis, insufficient nourishment is responsible alike, in most instances, fc* the deposit of tubercle and the inflammation to which it naturally gives rise. There are many men who, by a change of living, render the tubercles already deposited in their lungs harmless. Vitality becomes so high in its power that it dominates these evil influences, and they live out a fairly long life with enemies in their lungs that are rendered powerless by the strength of the fluid that fights them. We have seen consumption cured again and again by the simple process of building up the forces of ritality through passive exercise in the open air, and the supply of an abundance of nutritious food; and we have no doubt that it can be prevented in most instances by the same means. No human body con long endure the draught made upon it by a cold climate and by constant labor, unless it is well fed, well clothed and well housed. Somewhere deterioration will show itself, and in New England—nay, all over the kingdom of Great Britain it is the same, where the people are worse fed than here—the poverty of blood shows itself in the deposit of tuberculous matter in the lungs. There should be, by this time, some improvement in New England, in consequence of the increased intelligence of the people, but, so long as so many of them are running westward, and their places are taken by an ignorant foreign population, it is not likely that the statistics will show much improvement for a great many years to come. If our physicians could only be paid for preventing disease, and could be permitted to prescribe for each family its way of living, there would be but little difficulty in routing from its stronghold that most fatal and persistent enemy of human life which we call consumption.—Dr. Holland, in July Scribner.