Meat, Drink, and the Doctors

The World

WHAT shall we eat and drink? One after another the great doctors have set a seal of condemnation upon nearly everything that we like.

Tomatoes, we are warned, breed cancer. Cucumbers give colic. Beans are overrich and destructive of digestion. Beef contains the germ of tapeworm. Pigs and chickens have trichinae. Sugar, bread, and peas tend to diabetes. Wine gives gout. The "old oaken bucket that hangs in the well," the "moss-covered bucket," is infested with diseasegerms, and, besides that, the water of the well, not being properly aerated, is prolific of malady.

Even the bubbling spring bears typhoid in its waters, coming as they do from no man knows whither. Milk, the accepted type of innocence, is a disseminator of tuberculosis and other dread diseases, besides being indigestible to grownup folk.

And now at last comes a great German scientific sharp—Dr. Hans Koeppe—to warn us against chemically pure, distilled water as a positive and active poison, destructive of the mucous membrane and otherwise alarmingly deadly.

Now, we had all settled down upon distilled water as the one safe thing in the world to swallow. It is rather unpalatable, of course, it is troublesome to procure, and it is by no means satisfying to the cravings of a hungry and thirsty man; but at any rate we believed it to be unimpeachably wholesome and so thoroughly safe that our drinking of it—even with a grimace of disgust—we have regarded in the light of an almost supererogatory act of virtue.

Again, what are we to eat and drink? The doctors themselves who pronounce all these anathemas against solids and liquids eat and drink whatever they like. Some of them even eat mince pie at midnight and regale themselves in the small hours with Welsh rarebits and mulled clarets or hot Scotches.

Shall we follow their precepts or their practice?

The World.

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English as it is Written

March 2, 1899

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