MEDICAL NOTES.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 7503, 4 July 1903, Page 4

MEDICAL NOTES.

{Specially covi2>iled for the Wairakapa Daily Times.) Trifles That Tell on Health. How to Keeep Well and Strong. (ByDr J. RobertsonWallace.M.B., CM.) [From " answers."] TRIFLE ONE : AS THINGS ARE. With the potentialities of "little drops of water" and " little grains of sand" most of us have been familiar from childhood upwards, and experience teaches that life itself is made up of trifles. It is not, however, sufficiently realised that premature death is very often the cumulative results of trifles that tell on health, little habits appear of slight consequence at th 6 moment, but which, o£t repeated, influence for evil the most robust constitutions, and may wear out the hardiest of tissues even as drops of water wear away a stone. It is not the one grand heroic outbreak against the laws of hygiene that under-mines health so much as the little sins of omission and commission against sane and sanitary living that are of daily, nay, hourly occurrence among those who dio simply because they do not know how to live. Among the the commonest little habits that hinder health, or engender positive ill-hoaUb, are those associated with such common everyday occurrences as eating and drinking, sleeping, smoking, bathing, dressing, walking and so forth. The field for the aquiremsnt of ill-health is a very wide one, and persons may (and do) eat, drink, sleep, smoke, bathe, dress, or walk themselves into ill-health with s devotion worthy of a better cause. I shall consider the little bad habit associated with each of these forms of human activity in detail and show how they influence health, so that in future the reader will know exsctly A'hat he may do, and what he may not do, if his desire be to live to a green old age. TRIFLE TWO: DRINKING. Let us begin (as we too often do) with drinking. I only voice the views of my medical brothren when I say, as emphatically as I can, that people drink a good deal more alcoholic liquor than is good for them. A " small Scotch" seem a very small matter, and so it may be; but in a multitude of "small Scotches" thero is physiological disaster and final ruin. If men know what they were really " going to have " later on, m the shape of gout, liver disase, Blight's disease, heart disease, cerebral troubles and other deviations from health too numerous to mention, they would weigh their answers more carefully.

It is the habit of tippling between meals on an empty stomach that is so injurious, Tho right time to take a small whisky— and, even then, the smaller tho betteris with, or immediately after, dinuer, when it has an influence for good in promoting digestion and allaying the mental irritability that is produced by a busy day's work. Alcohol, is should never be forgotten, is a powerful drug with a special affinity for nerve-cells, whose yitality it always depresses and whose activities it always paralyses.

While on the subject of drinking I ought, porhaps, to mention that thero is no record of anyone having died from excessive indulgence in pure water. Want of this most necessary of foods— yes, water, strange as it may appear to the unphiiosophical, is as much a food as beefsteak or porridge - is a common cause of ill 'health. It constitutes about 75 per cent, of the bulk of the bodily tissues, acts aa a solvent of the food, assists in the elaboration of tho digestive and other juices, and is necessary to the efficient " sewerage " of the body. So necessary is water to the performance of the vital functions that its total deprivation causes death. And yet men and women, when thirsty, willingly drink anything other than water, trying to put Nature off with port, sherry, champagne, whisky, cognac, or liqueurs. This may sec-m a small matter, but it is assuredly another of those trifles that in the long run injure health. The deviations from normal health and positive injury to it that arise from everyday errors in eating are hardly less than those attributable to bad habits in drinking. People eat wrongly, wrong food, wrongly cooked, at wrong hours. This is a comprehensive indictment, but it is the truth. When I say people eat wrongly, I mean that some people dine as if eating wero a pastime; others as if it were a penance. It is neither tho one nor the other. Eating is really a solemn function, to be performed, however, without undue solemnity. Eating, in a word, is a duty to be done, but never undone. The due nourishment of tho body is a process to bo undertaken deliberately, without hurry. Food must be chewed slowly. If food be bolted, then good health is likely to bo barred. " Lightning lunches " are likely to be followed by " thundering " pains, lieinember that what is worth chewing is worth chewing well, and what is swallowed in haste frequently fails to be digested at leisure. TRIFLE THREE : EATING. Many persons regard the nature of tho food they araeating as quite a trifling matter, and pay more attention to the quantity than to the quality of their food. Thus the brain-worker makes a hearty luncheon of, say, steak-and-kidney pie, with half a pint of stout, and some sweet to follow, then wonders why he feels so sleepy, and why brilliant flashes of wit flights of imagination no longer emanate copiously from his brain. He forgets that when the animal organs are busiest the mental organ is the most sluggish-; he fears that his brilliant mental powers are on tho wane; ho becomes fearful, irritable and sleepless, and his distress reacts on his organs of digestion, which in turn affect his cerebral organs. And so tho vicious cycle goes on, until perhaps his health, either of body or mind, breaks down. This catastrophe might bave been a-vertcd by a trifling alteration in the victim's luncheon menu, for he would have satisfied the demands of his stomach and the requirements of his brain by lunching on a cup of chocolate and cream, roll and a little of one of the much-advertised cereal foods which are to be had everywhere, Many persons make the mi-take of eating a trifle too much every day, and this would not matter very much «ere it not that the organs of digestion, assimilation and excretion, are thereby a trifle overworked, and so, in the long run, worn out before their time. It is the last straw that breaks the camel's back, the last bit of roast pork that exhausts the stomach, the last driblet of sauce that goads tho liver to rebellion, and the last drop of liqueur brandy that fills the cup of tho uncomplaining kidney. It is difficult for many to achieve the happy mean in eating, and for the man of forty in particular that he must eq,fc

only sufficient food to repair tho wasto of the body. An excess of food beyond the bodily needs, even though it be trifling iv amount, must be stored away wherever space will permit, in the joints for example, or within the lax abdominal cavity, or in what may be described ns an annexe—an addition to the body bluntly described by surgeons as a tumor, benign or malignant, as the case may be. Thus cancer is believed by some authorities to be predisposed to by over-stimu-lation and over - nourishment of the tissues by an excess of food.

On tho other hand, many persons suffer in health by trifling with the hour sacred to food, making each meal a

movable feast, and making meals entirely secondary to business appointments ; whereas the latter ought to bo regulated by the former, sinco in order to keep any appointments at all one must be alive, and to live one must cat.

To derive tho fullest advantage from each meal it ought to be partaken of al a set hour each day, when the stomach and other organs that participate in the function of digestion will be prepared to receive and deal with it in the most efficient manner. What are often regarded as trifling irregularities in meal hours have in the long run a disastrous effect on the digestive organs, and so undermine the general health.

A medical man, whose name is unknown, has handed the chairman of the Victorian Board of Health tho sum of £250 for the relief of incurable consumptives. Mario Majeroni, the well-known actor, is to bo prosecuted at Dunedin on a chargo of disposing of abfcycle at one of the company's performances by chance — namely, the drawing of tickets.