HEALTH COLUMN.

Otago Witness, Issue 3115, 26 November 1913, Page 68

HEALTH COLUMN.

THE CARE OF THE STOMACH

When one considers the amount of talk (writes Dr Robert Wilson) which circles around the stomach—-talk in which words like appetite, dyspepsia, and digestion come with an air of certainty and meaning—it seems strange that the behaviour of the speakers should be so haphazard. I have known a doctor spend the whole of half an hour in explaining to a lady with gastric ulcer how serious was her condition, how doubtful it was whether he was justified in allowing food at all to pass into a wounded organ, and exhorting her to remain in bed for a week and live entirely upon email meals of Bcngcr's food; and yet, in less than a week, wo find that same lady, eased of her pain, tackling a big meal of hot buttered toast and sausages and tea. Trivial incidents ■ of life, things not fraught with serious consequences, receive infinitely more thought. That lady, had she been intending to carry a present of plums to someone, would have been earaful to choose a basket or box or strong paper bag for the fruit, and, had none of these been available?, and a thin pastrybag the only receptacle, she would carefully have examined and dried each plum, lest a burst or wet one should soften the paper and load to an accident Infinitely greater study, you see, of both contents and case than she gave to the life-and-death business of her delicate stomach and the meal she desired to swallow. Ignorance is not alone to blame, either. Appetite is more powerful than we know. In a town of the English midlands a club doctor on his rounds arrived at a little house just as the family sat around the dinner table watching the father and head carve a huge pie. That individual was making a slow convalescence from a severe gastritis (inflammation of the stomach), so the medical man felt it his duty to drop a warning. “If you eat any of that, Ben, 1 ' said ho, you’ll surely die.” “Happen so!” replied the patient, as if extinction wore a mere detail and the gratification of his palate the main-, object. But appetite is powerful in other ways. —The Value of Appetite.— It is a commonplace item of knowledge that to sec food or smell it, or even to talk of it, will stimulate the appetite. These things “make the mouth water,” or (in the dialect of other districts) “make the teeth water.” But it is not so generally known that at the very same time the stomach actually drips a juice in anticipation of work to be accomplished. Yet this is the fact. And the deduction to Ido drawn from it is that a healthy interest in the next meal, and a daintily spread table (decorated with flowers if you like), and articles of food good to look at and pleasant to smell, have each and all an important part to play in securing the most perfect digestion possible. Conversely, it is good sense and sound science to expect that a meal which makes no appeal to your nerves or will not bo as well borne or as faithfully dealt with by the stomach. Hence one should cat very sparingly of such a meal, and, if it were possible, make mastication a more thorough process than ever. Instinctively this seems to be done in many instances—witness the unhappy chew-chew-chewing of the child condemned to finished Jus pudding or porridge. and the slow reflective munching ot the cater in a restaurant of food his senses do not approve. The last deduction is that, for the patient in bed with a digestion epfoeblcd by illness, you can (and ought to) <M much by expending your ingenuity and taste in devising dainty meals of small helpings and tit-bits served in the nicest, neatest way you know. —A Good Beginning.— “Well begun is half done,” says the proverb, and the maxim holds for digestion. What first goes into the stomach has a deal to do with the manner in which the business of digestion goes forward. A little water seems to provoke secretion and help the subsequent work, cocoa has more power in the same direction, coffee also, and freshly-infused tea most power of all these fluids, ii.is tea. is a highly useful factor in a meal, save when the infusion stands until tannin (a hindrance to secretion, a source of indigestion, and a cause of constipation) is extracted from the leaves. From threo to four minutes should be the limit of infusion. But the best has yet to be mentioned. No fluid can help the stomach for its duties like one containing the highlyflavoured soluble substances of meat—fluids such as beef tea, mutton tea, meat extracts, soups, broths. These liquids when they touch the stomach wall—even, indeed, as they pass the mouth and gullet—start ’ the freest, strongest flow of gastric juice. For this reason it is significant and wonderful that for so long tpese things'have come early in the menu of every big feast. Again mankind has blundered into the wise and profitable lino of conduct. Doctors have, of course, recommended beef tea and the popular meat extracts; but these cannot be considered food. Fed on these alone, the average animal must on the average extract die of starvation. But, used as on© item in a scheme of diet, they justify their place, so stimulating the ordinary process of digestion that extraordinary results follow—much beyond what could be expected from the same diet wanting the meat extracts. Why, then, the observant reader will ask, does not every doctor recommend them in every dietary? The answer is that not every patient can manufacture the materials called for In such, stimulation. A man or woman may be too impoverished to respond, and, thus, as Dr R. Rendle Short has shoi\n. pepsin and such ferments being

too complex, too expensive for his or her system to elaborate, “it becomes clear why weakly people, convalescents, fever patients, and dyspeptics um' do very much better on a milk diet ’ —Beware: Take Care. Where a medical man is in attendance his opinion should be respected and followed to the letter. In other cases of feeble digestion, experience must bo made the guide, but ah experiments should be ventured upon in a gentle, cautious way—the effects being noted and remembered. In a general way it may bo said that the following should not bo included in the dietary of a dyspeptic: Fat meats and fat fowl and fat fish (pork, goose, duck, herring, salmon, mackerel, eels, sardines), cured meats and cured fish, tinned meats, veal, liver, kidney, sausage; fats and oils (butter, cream, hot-butterod toast and cakes) ; pastry, now bread; boiled puddings (dumpling, rolypoiy, suet puddings)’; dough-nuts, cheese, pickles, nuts, most raw fruits (save a few simple exceptions like grapes, ripe oranges, strawberries, and raspberries); most vegetables (save cauliflower, a little well-boiled greens, small helpings of potatoes) ; sweets, ices, and all alcoholic beverages. But. as I say, experience must bo the final law in this respect. TO CURE CORNS. When corns are very bad it. may bo necessary to call in the aid of a chiropodist, but much may he done in the way of alleviating this very real trouble by home treatment. Begin by softening the skin with vaseline or cold cream, rubbing it thoroughly for some considerable time. The next night remove all the hand skin you can, soften the corn by soaking in warm water, and rub it carefully with pumico stone, finishing the process by a rubbing with vaselin as before. Repeat this treatment every night, or at least every second night. The use of pumice stone is also to bo recommended for the hard skin which forms under the tread of the foot and sometimes at the inner side of the sole on the ball of the groat toe. This hardened skin is frequently as painful as corns, and when a thick ridge forms near ths too it throws the foot out of balance when walking, and causes groat discomfort. This is not always understood, but anyone who takes the trouble to remove the skin by persistent rubbing with pumice stone when the foot are washed in the morning or evening, as they should always bo, will at once feel the comfort of this treatment.