Healty Notes.

Freethought Review, Volume I, Issue 3, 1 December 1883, Page 7

Healty Notes.

A German doctor recommends bread made with sea water as a wonderful remedy against scrofula and disorders resulting from insufficient nourishment. Sea water ought to stand twelve hours before being used for making dough, in order to free it from impurities. Bread made with it has no unpleasant taste.

It is stated in a letter to the Standard, on the authority of the late Dr. Goolden, that a powerful disinfectant can be made as follows : " Half-a-drachm of nitrate of lead dissolved in one pint or more of boiling water. Two drachms of common salt dissolved in a bucket of water. Pour the two solutions together, and let the sediment subside. A cloth dipped in this solution, and hung up in a room will sweeten a foetid atmosphere instantaneously, or the solution thrown down a sink water closet, or drain, or over a heap of rubbish or manure, will produce a like result. Clothing worn by a patient with infectious disease, orbed linen, can be put at once into this solution without injury to the material, thus destroying the risk of infection for those persons who wash the clothing. Although it is a strong poison taken internally, it does not injure the skin. A room could be scrubbed with the solution, and would be sweetened at once by the process."

Miss Juliet Corson, in Harper's Bazaar, treats the bread question, as all other details of cookery, from a practical point of view. She says a good word for aerated bread, made of dough, into which carbonic acid gas is forced, and baked before the bubbles have a chance to escape. The main objection to fresh yeast bread for dyspeptics is that it is soft, and therefore too easily swollen, whereas the " stale" bread requires much mastication. If sufferers who have been avoiding new bread will take the same trouble in chewing it as they are compelled to do with the old, they will get all the advantage of their patience in the more palatable article. The fresh bread eater really takes his digestion with a much larger mass of spongy quality than the stale bread eater, and one which has not been as well broken up by the action of the saliva. If dyspeptics were careful to take the smallest mouthfuls at a time they Would find even fresh bread more manageable, with sufficient chewing, than is supposed. In the choice of flours, that made from hard winter wheat is the richest in gluten ; in Europe it is used for making the different varieties of macaroni; the brown bread of Europe is made from this wheat ground entire. Soft spring wheat yields a white flour rich in starch. Bran bread may be very irritating to some invalids, so " Graham bread " and the " whole-meal" fashion should only be adopted when it is proved to be satisfactory. The particles of bran may cause an irritation of the alimentary canal and produce diarrhaes. Undoubtedly this irritation or stimulus may be exactly what is needed by some constitutions.