Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 February 1884 — Healthfulness of Fruit. [ARTICLE]

Healthfulness of Fruit.

Dr. B. F. Dunkley has made public some interesting facts, derived from his own experience, in regard to the healthfulness of .fruit. When he first went to (the West, thirty years ago, no orchards were there, and few vegetables were raised. The diet of the people consisted of corn bread, bacon, and a little black coffee without sugar or cream. Inflammatory disorders, such as relate to the lungs, brain, bowels, and heart, prevailed in the winter, and were often attended with fatal results. Malignant dysentery, the pest of armies shut off from fruit, afflicted many of the inhabitants in the summer and fall, and in the spring it was not uncommon for whole families to be sick with scurvy, the disease so fatal with sailors on long voyages before canning fruit was discovered. Dr. Dunkley told his scurvystricken patients, to their great surprise, that their blood needed no medicine other than vegetable acids, and he ordered them to eat oranges, lemons, and sheep sorrels. Now fruit and garden vegetables are abundant in the locality, and the diseases are not of so malignant a type, and yield much more readily to treatment. When orchards first began to bear, Dr. Dunkley noticed that those children whose fathers had planted apple trees, ate plentifully of the fruit, both green and ripe, and enjoyed most excellent health, while children living where no apple trees grew were dying of flux. Postal cards were introduced by Prof. Emanuel Herman, of Vienna. They were first used in England, Germany and Switzerland in 1870, in Belgium and Denmark in 1871, and in Norway, Bvssia and the United States in 1872-73. In this world of ours there are people who would make just as much stir, and do just as much good, and benefit society just as much—and we don’t know but more—were they killed and stuffed. There are 5,000 ballet girls in London.