I know no more-my latest dream Which fix'd my dull eyes from afar, An icy sickness curdling o'er My heart, and sparks that cross'd my brain Art. VI. Récherches Physiologiques et Médicales sur les Causes, les Symptomes, et le Traitement, de la Gravelle. Par F. Magendie, Docteur en Médecine de la Faculté de Paris, &c. &c. Svo. pp. 91. Paris, 1818. THE HE medical visits we pay our readers, it will have been observed, are few and far between.' The principle by which we are guided in our selection of topics bearing upon the healing art, have been in former articles distinctly stated; it is only upon questions partaking of a physiological interest, or involving the application of preventive measures beyond the boundaries of the profession, that we for the most part feel inclined to descant, conceiving that treatises on the theory and practice of medicine, which are purely and exclusively such, are more appropriately referred to journals devoted to their special discussion. Volumes, however, occasionally offer themselves for notice, which, although partaking of a medical character, are nevertheless of that mixed kind which gives them a popular as well as a professional interest. They bear the same relation to medicine, properly so called, that writings on jurisprudence do to the practice of the law, or dispensations on the science of political economy to the actual business of legislation. The question indeed has recently been much agitated, how far it is desirable that the several branches of study which constitute the ground-work of medical theory and practice, should be made the subject of popular investigation. On the one hand, it is said, teach man physiology, that is, unfold to him the manner in which life is connected with internal organization and external influences, and besides ensuring the more obvious and ordinary advantages attendant upon an enlarged sphere of acquirement, you will go a considerable way towards checking baneful propensities and preventing intemperate habits. On the other hand, it is contended that the most uninstructed individual is sufficiently aware both of the criminality and the injurious nature of intemperance, and that crimes against the law of his being are not committed unconsciously or in ignorance, but with as complete a knowledge of cause and effect as any that physiology could furnish. For ourselves, we incline on this disputed point, to an intermediate opinion. As far as success in the practice of physic is concerned, we verily believe that the faith of ignorance, could it be universally ensured, would generally prove more conducive to salutary operation, than that comparative scepticism, with regard to the agency of medicine, which must necessarily grow out of an acquaintance with the laws and limits of medicinal action. At the same time, we are ready to admit that the diffusion of physiological knowledge is very likely to act as a check upon professional indolence and empirical imposture; and that it may in some cases prove more effectual in preventing vieious habits, than the most careful inculcation of moral precepts. It might perhaps be urged, that facts have already furnished as with decided evidence of the efficacy of a more generally diffused knowledge on these subjects. It is undeniable, that one species of excess, at least, is not so common now among the higher and middle classes of society, as it was some twenty years ago; but whether this comparative sobriety has arisen from the caprice of fashion, from the pressure of the times, or from the more extensive spread of science, we will not pretend to determine. The work before us has given rise to the above suggestions, from the circumstance of its being chiefly an enunciation of principles and precepts relative to diet and modes of living. It is not a very long time since we had occasion to treat of calculous complaints; we now are induced to resume the topic, with Dr. Magendie's treatise as a text-book, partly because we are desirous of adding somewhat to the remarks made in a former article, and partly from the opportunity the discussion will afford, of considering more at large the general connexion of diet and disease. In all sciences that are not absolutely demonstrative, or in which individual opinion may give a cast or colouring to inductions from correct data, there are two sources of the mistakes which are apt to mingle themselves with our inferences. In the first place, we are inclined, often unconsciously, to grasp at facts which favour our preconceptions, while we neglect those which appear inimical to our cause; and secondly, we are disposed to presume upon an analogy, where analogy does not actually exist, and thus to substitute defective hypothesis for substantial theory; In this way we are led to draw conclusions which seem to come upon our own minds with the force of little less than absolute demonstration, but which will not bear the test of rigid and im partial scrutiny. Of the truth of this remark, the very ingeniVol XII. N. S. 0 ous tract before us affords ample illustration. From some isolated but, so far as it goes, very strong evidence, Dr. Magendie infers that animal diet is the cause of gravel; and having, as he supposes, ascertained the fact, he propounds, by way of explaining this fact, a principle which, according to our conceptions, rests merely upon defective analogies drawn from inanimate to living existence. To the use of animal food have been ascribed, even by some individuals in our own country, not only gravel, but scrophula, cancer, consumption, asthma, gout, and indeed all the chronic ailments that are incident to man; and there are very many who, although they may not go the length of some of the ultra enemies to this kind of diet, and do not quite suppose that with every slice of beef we actually swallow a dose of poison, still are inclined to attribute a variety of diseases to this source, and to suppose that vegetable aliment would at the least ensure against their easy induction. An extended disquisition on this contested point, would properly embrace the following particulars of inquiry. First, how far is man shewn to be carni verous or herbiverous, by the form and structure of his body, and by the display of his natural or unsophisticated propensities? Secondly, what were the habits of our species, as it respects food, at former periods? Thirdly, what is the diet, and what, so far as they can be judged of, are the consequences of such diet in different parts of the world? Fourthly, what correspondence would there appear to be between our aliment and the more prevalent ailments of this country, now, and in the time of our forefathers? And lastly, is that class of our countrymen, at the present time, which consumes the greatest pro portion of animal food, in the same ratio obnoxious to constitutional disease? As far as structure would determine the question of man's alimentary destination, the vegetable apologists. seem to consider themselves as almost invincible, since, in the human species, as they urge, those teeth are wanting that are invariably found in carniverous animals: at least, the teeth which are termed ca. nine, in man, have nothing in their make answerable to the teeth of the same name in those brutes which refuse vegetable, and live upon animal food. But in their burry to seize upon this fact, our speculatists have overlooked the circumstance, that almost all the carnivora except man, are in some measure animals of prey, and that nature has provided them with the teeth in question, both for procuring and for tearing their food. Now, neither of these processes is performed by man; he is not accustomed to take his meat raw, nor by force in the way of seizure. The molares, or grinding teeth, moreover, correspond, as it regards structure, in a very marked manner to the teeth of the omni cerous class of animals, or those which are capable of being sustained either by a mixture of both kinds, or exclusively by one kind of aliment. With respect to the other principal distinction in structure namely, the form and length of the intestinal canal, although man in this particular is removed to a considerable distance from the proper carnivora,' he cannot be classed with the herbivora: in fact, as it regards both the teeth and the intestines, there are indications which must be satisfactory to any sober judgement, that it was the design of Providence that man's proper food should be of a mixed kind, while at the same time he should be enabled occasionally to accommodate himself to a protracted use of either species of aliment alone. With regard to early propensities, as marks of original destination. we see no great force in the inference deduced from the alleged fact of a few. wild men of the woods' having evinced an exclusive propensity for fruits and herbs, since, from the node in which they had been sustained from infancy, such aliment was the only one with which they had been made acquainted. All that has been adduced on the subject of propensity and structure, avails to prove, certainly, that man is not an animal of prey, but, the argument avails no further. 66 The inquiry, What were the habits of man in the earliest periods of society? would lead to the question of antediluvian diet and longevity; but the only records which exist descriptive of the world before the flood,' contain, in respect to diet, no positive information. We must cominence our comparison of ancient and modern customs, from patriarchal times subsequent to the Deluge; and if abstaining from animal food and from drink are dictates of nature, it will be seen that man very soon learned to disregard them, and degenerated into a carniverous, a 'drinking,*' and a ' cooking' animal. We read that Abraham, when entertaining his celestial guests, ran unto the herd and fetched a "calf tender and good, and gave it unto a young man and he "hasted to dress it. And he took butter and milk, and the calf "which he had dressed, and set it before them, and he stood by "them under the tree, and they did eat." We have upon record even before this time, the express command of God to Noah on this head: “ Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for 66 you even as the green herb have I given you all things." Genesis ix. 3. Again. When Isaac was " advanced to a good "old age," he instructs Esau to make him some" savoury meat, such as he loved, and, by implication, such as he had been in * It has been asserted by one theorist, who maintains the vegetable creed with great pertinacity, that were man to live upon esculent and undressed vegetables, there would be no occasion for him to drink at all; and that he is not by nature a drinking unimal' !! the practice of eating. So that we have very early proofs of what the maintainers of the herbaceous hypothesis are disposed to deny, namely, the compatibility of long life and animal diet. But let us come to the test of what may be considered a fairer comparison, that of the respective diet and corresponding longevity of different parts of the world in the present time. this head, a great deal of labour has been employed to prove that in those regions of the globe, for instance, in extensive districts of the eastern world, where, from religious or other motives, man lives exclusively upon vegetable matter, instances of longevity are more frequent, than in countries where opposite habits are prevalent. But all the ingenuity of sophistry is found unavailing to enable the abettors of this doctrine to make any way against the strong current of opposing and unsuspicious evidence. It has been asserted by witnesses who have not any particular case to make out, that, on the one hand, the vegetable-eaters of India scarcely ever advance beyond, or even attain the age of sixty. On the other hand, the inhabitants of Lapland and Iceland, countries in which so much animal food in the form of fish is consumed, are distinguished by more than ordinary longevity. Much more, probably, in either case, is attributable to climate and other physical causes, than to the mode and matter of sustenance; but even in this particular, the advocate of fish, flesh, and fowl,' has quite as much to favour his side of the question, as the stickler for the superior salubrity of vegetable fare. We have hitherto been advancing upon ground over which the generality of our readers will not have felt much hesitation in following us. The solution of the two remaining questions, however, involves positions somewhat more debatable. The quantum of animal food consumed in this country, as connected with the quantum of disease, is a question of high interest to parents who are anxious for the welfare of their offspring. Now, it is a fact too often overlooked by advocates for a meagre regimen, that a much larger proportion of animal food was consumed, by some classes of society at least, formerly, than in our own time. Let the breakfast of a maid of honour in Elizabeth's Court, be contrasted with the corresponding meal of the same description of personage in the present day, and then, until-it can be proved to us that the chine-devouring dames of the period alluded to, were more liable to constitutional maladies' than our present teadrinking court ladies, we shall take leave to doubt the direct connexion between quantity of food and quantity of disease in the way that the defenders of abstemiousness suppose. Again we are told by Sir John Fortescue, who wrote in the fifteenth century, when he is setting the health and happiness of the British poor against those of other nations, that they (the 'poor) are fed in great abundance with all sorts of flesh and fish, |