p. 135 | Health and Temperance

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 26, 1885

Health and Temperance.

Bilious People.

THE following is from Dio Lewis' new book, "Our Digestion," and is worthy of consideration:—

"A clergyman comes to see me a dozen times a year about his biliousness. I know a great many people who are bilious. They have no dyspepsia, they never had a symptom of dyspepsia in their lives; they are only bilious.

"Now, this word biliousness is a sort of respectable cover for piggishness. Reader, are you bilious? (Rather a hard question after the above remark.) Let me prescribe for you. If you follow my prescription, and don't get speedily well, write me, and in the next edition of this work I will announce my error.

"First, on getting up and going to bed drink plenty of cold water. Eat for breakfast until the bilious attack passes, a little stale bread, say one slice, and a piece half as large as your hand of boiled lean beef or mutton. If the weather is warm, take instead a little cracked wheat or oatmeal porridge. For dinner take about the same thing. Go without your supper.

"Exercise freely in the open air, producing perspiration, once or twice a day. In a few days your biliousness is all gone. This result will come, even though the biliousness is one of the spring sort, and one with which you have, from year to year, been much afflicted. Herb drinks, bitter drink, lager beer, ale, whisky, and a dozen other spring medicines, are simply barbarous.

"I had a friend, a lawyer, living at Buffalo, N. Y., who was famous for bilious attacks. Once or twice a month he had an attack of bilious headache, and sometimes was obliged to ask the postponement of an important suit. At length, tired and disgusted, he came to me and asked if nothing could be done, for really it was getting to be the torment of his life. I told him how to eat and drink and exercise, and promised him if he would follow my prescription he should never have another bilious sick headache. My prophecy proved true as to two or three years, but after a time he got back into the ale, strong coffee, sausage, buckwheat cakes, hot rolls, melted butter, and other abominations, and of course his old headaches. But he knew the remedy, and when it became too hard to bear, he fell back upon the prescription, and has never failed to obtain relief.

"A great many persons seem to be quite willing to suffer a constant depression of spirits, constant indigestion, with its innumerable torments—entirely willing to suffer all this for the momentary pleasure of slipping down their throats something which tastes good. I can think of nothing else which so strikingly exhibits man's undeveloped condition.

"Is it not funny to see a dyspeptic whose life is one unbroken torture, who wishes himself dead, who never has a good night's sleep, and never a single happy, social hour, whose whole life is a failure, both as to enjoyment and usefulness, but who, three times a day, shovels into his stomach a quantity of greasy, hot, indigestible trash, to keep up the flame, producing and reproducing the suffering? Assure him that this is the cause of all his suffering, and he replies, in the spirit of a martyr:—

"Oh, I suppose, doctor, it is so, but then, after all, I go for a short life and a merry one."

"Short life and a merry one, indeed! That's a grim joke. Merry! Why, a temperate man, who eats just what he needs, and enjoys the harmonious play of all his powers and faculties of body and soul, has more happiness in one day than one of these 'short-and-merry-life' fellows has in a year. The temperate man's life is one of constant flow of solid enjoyment. He is conscious of usefulness, of filling a place in the world, while this short-and-merry-life gormandizer and drinker is afflicted with the thought that his life is blasted. What the dyspeptic means by 'a short life and a merry one' is the momentary tickling of his palate with plum pudding, followed by six hours of groaning."