COLLAPSE OF A RAW-MEAT SANATORIUM.
A few months ago there was opened in Belgium a sanatorium for the special purpose of treating tuberculous patients according to Ricket's method, which consists chiefly in feeding the patient upon a diet of raw meat. Three months’ experience was sufficient to convince those in charge of the hospital that “there was no efficacy whatever in the method.” The experiment has accordingly been abandoned, and the institution has been closed. The astonishing thing is that medical men can be found who are so devoid of physiological knowledge and scientific training, not to say ordinary good sense, as to be willing to risk their reputation in connection with an effort of such a sort. It has long been asserted by physiologists that human beings can not live on an exclusive meat diet without seriously imperiling the health. Even dogs, which are supposed to be carnivorous animals, become sick if fed exclusively upon meat. If a dog is wanted for hunting purposes or to perform in an animal show, meat is carefully excluded from his dietary, it being well recognized that a non-flesh dietary gives a dog better wind, greater endurance, and renders him more intelligent and tractable than does a flesh dietary. Diabetics fed upon a meat diet become comatose, and die of autointoxication, a fact which the medical practitioners of France were the first to recognize, but which has now become known to the whole medical world. That a meat diet increases the frequency of the fits or paroxysms in epilepsy is so well known that for more than twenty years no physician has been so far behind the times as to prescribe flesh foods to a patient suffering from this condition. The medical profession is fast awakening to the fact that many diseases are either produced or augmented by the excessive use of animal foods.—Herald of Health.