TOO great a variety of food at one meal is injurious to health. Late dinners or suppers, with their long drawn-out courses of many dishes, are no longer a novelty; flesh foods in half a dozen varieties or more are devoured at a single meal, and vegetables, boiled, baked, fried, stewed, scalloped, or steamed, are served with rich dressings, together with fruits, grains, jellies, ices, pickles, salads, etc., etc., etc.
Soups are taken to warm the stomach, ices to cool it, condiments to stimulate it, vegetables to fill it, wines to give it tone, flesh to satisfy its cravings, coffee or tea to wash the food down, and the innumerable variety of pies, cakes, and puddings, together with frozen cream, are eaten to satisfy the mind that a "square meal" has been devoured. But the end is not yet; the pleasure of eating is over with, it is true, but what will the stomach now do with such a conglomerate mass. The stomach has it, and must take care of it in some way. So in order that the reader might better understand what trouble and distress he brings upon his digestive organs when he compels them to work beyond their strength, the writer has concluded to stop here and refer you to the able article that is subjoined hereto, "The Conscientious Stomach," written by Mary Henry Rossiter, of the Battle Creek (Mich.) Sanitarium. B. F. RICHARDS.
The Conscientious Stomach.
The digestive organs awoke with a start. The mouth felt bad, and sighed for a drink of water. The tongue was so thickly covered with germs that the salivary glands made fun of it. Their merriment, however, was of short duration, for the tongue retorted that they looked rather empty themselves, and the mouth remarked sternly that they had better be about their business, if they intended to moisten the breakfast. The pharynx and œsophagus were not very amiable, having a vivid recollection of some blistering salad that had made them smart the night before. The stomach examined its various pits and depressions with great anxiety. Its wrinkles deepened when it discovered the cause of the disturbances which had broken its rest for hours. A mass of decaying and fermenting food was still moving over its lower surface, while millions of germs were dancing about and multiplying at a tremendous rate.
"This is terrible!" groaned the stomach, "but what can I do? My muscular tissues worked as hard as they could for five or six hours, and the gastric juices dissolved everything possible. It is the imperative business of the pylorus to keep its orifice shut against everything but chyme; certainly this stuff is not ready for the duodenum." And the stomach churned up a long string of connective tissue and several pieces of wilted celery.
"Good-morning," said a peptic gland to a pyloric gland near by.
"Good-morning," replied the other, as both began to bestir themselves for the day's work.
"I do hope that our dear stomach will not have so much to do to-day as it did yesterday."
"Yes, indeed," rejoined the second, putting the final touches on a drop of juice. "It was so exhausted last night when the last bit of chyme squeezed through the pylorus, that I am sure it couldn't have contracted another time, no matter what came into it."
"And the worst of it is," continued the peptic gland, "there is a wretched residue of indigestible things that could not get through the pylorus at all, and they have been here all night. Those hateful germs are swarming all over the stuff, and are getting disgustingly fat and happy. I did hope that we were going to starve them out, but the chance is evidently gone for the present."
"It's all on account of the chicken salad, olives, coffee, ice-cream, and cake that came rushing down here, pell-mell, late last night, just as we thought we had everything tidy and ready to leave," said the pyloric gland, which was a very domestic and neat little body. "For my part, I think the mouth didn't do just right. It knew very well that the stomach had not had a moment's rest all day, and I think it might have been a little more considerate."
"But, my dear child," remonstrated the peptic gland, which was more of a philosopher, "the mouth could not help it. The poor thing has to do just what the Man says, and you know yourself that he is a perfect tyrant."
"But he must be a very wonderful being, that Man," said the little pyloric gland, "to be able to defy and control the laws of nature the way he does."
"Wonderful, truly!" said the other dyspeptically. "For my part, I don't believe any more that the Man knows a thing. I think he's an imbecile."
"For mercy's sake!" exclaimed the pyloric gland, secreting several drops of gastric fluid in its excitement, "what makes you think that?"
But before this question could be answered, the two glands became aware of a hurried rhythmical movement along the œsophagus not far away, and suddenly a gulp of hot coffee came plunging into the stomach. Several pieces of half-chewed toast mixed with oatmeal, sugar, and cream, followed immediately. Then came a large mass of beefsteak, then another and another. These were thickly covered with pepper, butter, and mustard, and accompanied by small, hard pieces of fried potatoes. For several minutes the half-masticated steak and potatoes came tumbling down without an instant's pause; then, after a brief respite, the œsophagus swallowed in two buttered pancakes, a quantity of maple syrup, and a doughnut.
The stomach moaned and stirred feebly.
"What better evidence of imbecility do you want than that?" exclaimed the peptic gland, and it sent off a few drops of peptic juice to meet this food. "Look at that toast; for instance, made of half-baked bread in the first place, and full of germs that are just nicely warmed up by the toasting process and prepared to do us every sort of mischief. Then there is all that starch in the oatmeal, as well as the bread. I don't believe the ptyalin ever touched it. It doesn't look like it, and it didn't stay in the mouth long enough anyway, so we can not do a thing with that. There is so much energy wasted by the Man! How ridiculous, too, to put sugar on oatmeal; just as if the body couldn't make all the sugar it wanted out of starch! My! but the œsophagus must be inflamed, with all that pepper and mustard scratching its walls and burning its membrane. You can see for yourself that the Man doesn't know anything, or he wouldn't act so. But we must get to work faster, or that food will lie around here all day."
The stomach by this time had begun to recover from the shock of the arrival of the meal, and was calling for the gastric juices to come to its help. The latter needed no urging, but in numberless little globules ventured out from the tiny ducts, clung timidly for a moment to the edges of the alveoli, and then began to drop off bravely on the nearest mouthfuls; soon a steady stream of digestive fluid enveloped the entire mass of food, while the stomach's muscular layers began to contract, gently churning and mixing every portion of the breakfast. The mucous lining smoothed out its folds to make more room, and all the blood corpuscles in the neighborhood crowded close to the transparent membrane. So wonderful are the resources of nature, and so vigorously did the stomach attack its task, that possibly even the heterogeneous conglomeration of incompatibilities collected in this breakfast might have been reconciled and assimilated had not the Man, at this moment, felt thirsty. The mouth, the pharynx, and the œsophagus had been so irritated by the condiments forced against their surfaces that they set up a lusty cry for water; hence, no sooner had the stomach put its energies in motion than a sudden flood of ice-cold water swept down into it, stopping all the secretions, driving the corpuscles back from the walls, and paralyzing every activity. It was some time before the corpuscles ventured back to their work, and began to warm up the poor little glands that were stiff with cold. By and by a few drops of gastric juice oozed slowly forth and began a desultory work on the saturated food. By degrees the muscular tissues resumed opera13tions, and the process of digestion was again under way.
The stomach felt exceedingly heavy. After revolving its contents carefully, it sent a message of gas to the mouth. The gas signified to the mouth that fermentation had already begun. The stomach, it said, was well aware that the mouth, like itself, labored under limitations; but could it not, for once, refuse to open its lips to further atrocities that day? This course would, the mouth would assuredly agree, favor the best interests of the Man as well; for with its present burdens the stomach would be absolutely unable to send any more nourishment to the body unless it could have a little peace.
The mouth replied that itself, the teeth, and the tongue were all in thorough sympathy with the stomach, and would do everything possible to carry out its wishes. At the same time it could think of no way to keep itself closed against the Man's will unless it could manage to bring on lockjaw. It feared, however, that this would be impossible, since the Man had a terror of lockjaw, and took every precaution against it; besides, there was danger—
But here the mouth's remarks were cut short by a cigar placed between its teeth.
The stomach would have begun to ache had it not learned by experience that if it did the Man would send down a pill or a powder that would merely stop the pain and make matters still worse. Many a time the stomach, feeling the hopelessness of the situation, had resolved to protest no more, even to the mouth, but to bear its sufferings in silence, and to do its duty by the Man without murmuring so long as any one of its functions continued able to work. But the stomach realized better than any other part of the body the vital importance of digestion. It knew that every other organ, that every blood-vessel, muscle, and nerve, in short, that every cell of the whole physical system, was dependent upon it for food; that the entire Man, even to his inmost thoughts and emotions, was made of the elements prepared in its laboratory. Altho from earliest infancy it had been constantly abused, tormented, and overworked to gratify the capricious whims of the Man, his family, and his friends, yet it was sincerely and deeply attached to him, not only by the tissues surrounding it, but also by that subtle and indefinable natural affinity that underlies all blood relationships. The stomach loved the Man, and altho in the nature of things it could never have studied physiology, yet it knew by instinct that his course of life was all wrong, that there was no possible harmony between the food he ate and what he expected of it after assimilation. It saw plainly that the Man was slowly but certainly starving and poisoning himself to death. His bones, his muscles, his brain, his hair, his nerves, his blood, were all crying hungrily for food, and irritably refusing the poison that was sent them for bread.
And so on this occasion, as many times before, the stomach turned again to its vast army of little helpers. In them it never found disappointment. On the morning in question every particle of gastric juice that had been able to recover its vital power and to get a foothold on the coarse, chilled masses of food, was earnestly at work dissolving connective tissue and making peptones. The acids of the stomach were breaking down the albuminous walls of the fat cells so as to set free their oily contents, and dissolving also the mineral salts. Not being able to act upon fats or starch, the gastric juice could not do much with the fried potatoes, the oatmeal, or the toast. This was unfortunate, since none of the food had remained in the mouth long enough to be acted upon by the salivary glands; therefore a large share of it could now be removed from the stomach only by peristalsis.
"It is really pathetic," remarked the pyloric gland, which was watching the struggle from the door of its duct, "to see how hard those juices work. They are giving their lives for the sake of the Man, and yet he never lifts a finger to make their sacrifice easier."
"What I am worried about," said the peptic gland, "is that we are not going to have any time to rest before the luncheon comes down. Not that I mind so much on my own account working when I am tired, but I have already secreted all the gastric juice I had prepared for, and I can not possibly get any more ready so soon. I am sorry for the poor stomach, too. It is always so mortified when it has to force into the intestines food that is not properly reduced."
"Well," exclaimed the other, "I should like just once to lay my nerves on that Man. I am only a weak little ignorant gastric gland, but I know I try as hard as I can to do what nature tells me, and I am sure the Man does not, or else he has never paid enough attention to what she says, to know. Sometimes I think he has never heard that it makes any difference what he eats; then, again, I think that he doesn't care; that he just eats things that make that horrid little palate feel good, and doesn't care a thing about all the rest of us. I don't know, but I get all confused when I think about it."
But the patient little glands and all the other activities of the stomach had no more time for social amenities that day. It would be tedious to tell of the ice-cold ginger ale, that sent a shiver through every cell of the digestive organs; of the luncheon that followed the ginger ale; of the peppery soup that made the salivary glands feel lazy, and tore the lining of the œsophagus; of the cold roast pork and the Saratoga chips that sank like lead to the bottom of the soup; of the olives, the jelly, the salad, the pepper-sauce, the ice-cream, the chocolate cake that made the stomach's afternoon one long Spanish torture; to tell again of the evening dinner, the roast chicken and French potatoes, the cucumbers and vinegar, the tomatoes with mayonnaise dressing, the coffee, with green apple pie, and imported cheese. Perhaps it is cruel to mention the Welsh rarebit and the pint of beer that came down about midnight.
Suffice it to say that the Man was sick in the night. When a soft, kind stomach pump descended through the gullet to take away its revolting and intractable burden, the heart-broken stomach, that had worked so faithfully and conscientiously for forty years, heard the Man say between groans: "I have a beastly stomach. Were it not for that I should be a happy man."
