Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 October 1889 — An Epicure on Indigestion. [ARTICLE]

An Epicure on Indigestion.

“That pet American ailment, indigestion,” remarked an epicure oi some local celebrity, to the Chicago Journal, “is not so much the result ol h faulty selection of things to eat as of an injudicious arrangement of the •rder of their consumption. The method of the ordinary American, in eating a dinner at a hotel or restaurant by himself, is if he is a man of any appetite, simply suicidal. He orders everything he wantsatonce.anditfr brought to him ;.t once. He has, let us say, two kinds of meat and three or four of veget bles, with ail the condiments and seasonings thrown in. The plates are arranged around him. He starts in, and until he has finished the articles of diet are pitched into him helter-skelter, as though he were a threshing maching or clothes-wringer. Every vegetable or relish that might otherwise be harmless to him, is, under this condition of things utterly horrible. Take cucumbers, tor example, a luxury of which very few physicians approve. Suppose those cucumbers go eddying into the diner’s stomach as a part of a mass or hotch-potch of which a slice of beef, half a potato, a mouthful of whitefish and an inch or so of pie form the leading features. Wnat sort of a deithpill is that to sling into a decent man’s insides? No, sir, let your food be graded to suit your digestion and all will be well. Swallow your soup leisurely, then your fish and meat; after that take a five-minute rest and a cigarette, and then make your lettuce and cucumbers and si iced tomatoes into a salad, with plenty of oil, and con•ume it slowly and appreciatively. Top that off with a mouthful or two of hot coffee and a sip of curacoa, and I’ll give you a dollar for every minute of indigestion you endure as the consequence. The average man’s stomach is not a mule, to be driven and bullied into submission; it is a pet that should be coaxed and coddled to do its prettiest”