Lehman, quoted by Dr. Christison, says that, among the well and active “the infusion of 1 oz. of roasted coffee daily will diminish the waste” going on in the body” “by one-fourth,” [Transcriber’s note:  Quotes as in the original] and Dr. Christison adds that tea has the same property.  Now this is actual experiment.  Lehman weighs the man and finds the fact from his weight.  It is not deduced from any “analysis” of food.  All experience among the sick shows the same thing.[3]

[Sidenote:  Cocoa.]

Cocoa is often recommended to the sick in lieu of tea or coffee.  But independently of the fact that English sick very generally dislike cocoa, it has quite a different effect from tea or coffee.  It is an oily starchy nut having no restorative power at all, but simply increasing fat.  It is pure mockery of the sick, therefore, to call it a substitute for tea.  For any renovating stimulus it has, you might just as well offer them chestnuts instead of tea.

[Sidenote:  Bulk.]

An almost universal error among nurses is in the bulk of the food and especially the drinks they offer to their patients.  Suppose a patient ordered 4 oz. brandy during the day, how is he to take this if you make it into four pints with diluting it?  The same with tea and beef tea, with arrowroot, milk, &c.  You have not increased the nourishment, you have not increased the renovating power of these articles, by increasing their bulk,—­you have very likely diminished both by giving the patient’s digestion more to do, and most likely of all, the patient will leave half of what he has been ordered to take, because he cannot swallow the bulk with which you have been pleased to invest it.  It requires very nice observation and care (and meets with hardly any) to determine what will not be too thick or strong for the patient to take, while giving him no more than the bulk which he is able to swallow.

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] [Sidenote:  Intelligent cravings of particular sick for particular articles of diet.]

In the diseases produced by bad food, such as scorbutic dysentery and diarrhoea, the patient’s stomach often craves for and digests things, some of which certainly would be laid down in no dietary that ever was invented for sick, and especially not for such sick.  These are fruit, pickles, jams, gingerbread, fat of ham or bacon, suet, cheese, butter, milk.  These cases I have seen not by ones, nor by tens, but by hundreds.  And the patient’s stomach was right and the book was wrong.  The articles craved for, in these cases, might have been principally arranged under the two heads of fat and vegetable acids.

There is often a marked difference between men and women in this matter of sick feeding.  Women’s digestion is generally slower.