Yorkville enquirer. [volume] (Yorkville, S.C.) 1855-2006, 1897-06-23
Miseetlanfo,1s Reading.
ABSURD POPULAR BELIEFS.
The Reason Why Medical Fakirs Prosp

ABSURD POPULAR BELIEFS.
The Reason Why Medical Fakirs Prosper.
"Nine out of ten people believe" I"
said surgeon to the writer, "that the
eye can be taken out for repairs, just
like the works of watch, and again
replaced in the socket precisely as it
was before. A moments reflection
to show anyone how impossible this
would be. As a matter of fact, the
eye is held in place by no fewer than
six taut muscles, and, in order to turn
it out of the socket, at least four of
these would have to be cut through.
Besides, it is connected with the brain
by q thick nerve which cannot be
stretched, and it is also connected with
the inside of the skull by blood-ves-
sells, and if these were cut they could
never be reunited: Perhaps a time
will come when a dead man can be re-
stored to life; but you may feel per-
fectly sure that the removal and res
toration of the eye is surgical feat
that will never be performed.
"Another extraordinary popular be-
lief is that respecting the nature of q
common cold. You will hear the most
intelligent men saying that it is due to
an excess of cold inside your body, and
they will advise you to use mustard
plaster 'to draw out the cold.' In
reality the cold is simply an excess of
heat inside, and the mustard plaster is
intended to draw out the heat. What
happens when you get a cold is that
the cooling of the outside of the body
saueezes the blood-vessels, and forces
a lot more blood into the lungs than
can be accommodated. They become
regularly flooded and gorged, and the
result is really a fever, though we call
it cold.
"It seems a small thing to make q
mistake'abouC the value of beef tea to
a sick man but I can assure you that
hundreds of lives have been lost
through the popular error that beef
tea is a nourishing food. 1t is nothing
more than water in which the pleasant
and stimulating salts of the beef are
dissolved, and has the same effect as
mixture of whisky and China tea.
But it has scarcely particle of nutri.
ment, and both doctors and public
have starved to death more people
than I'd like to state through relieving
that it has.
every similar is the belief that an
egg is as good as a pound of meat. If
YOU o feed yourself on eggs according to
this absurd theory, you will simply
shrivel up into skin and bones. The
real value of an egg is its weight in
good beef; so that it would take eight
eggs of the average size to supply the
place of a pound Of meat.
"Then there is the universal fallacy
about the liver. I dsresay that mil
lion of money is spent every year on
the livers of Great Britain, and about
nine hundred thousand of that sum
does harm instead of good. The liver
is subject to about one hundred dis
eases, and the cure for any one of
these may intensity any other Of
the ninety-nine. To take one case
as an example: The liver may be
making too much bile, or it may be
making too little. Obviously, the
remedy for one of these disorders
would make the other worse than
ever. So that when person recon-
mends something as being good for
the liver,' just think that it may be
good for his liver, but not for yours.
"Women are far worse than men in
their beliefs about the body and it's
ailments. I am quite sure that out
of every hundred children who die
under one year old, fifty are actually
killed through the mothers belief that
food is not nourishing unless it is solid.
They don't understand that milk bas
an immense amount of solid matter
dissolved in it, as sugar is dissolved in
water and so they give the unfortu-
nate children cornflour and bread,
which they can no more digest than
they could digest iron nails. The re-
suit is a short life of misery and then
death, while those of us who manage
&c survive are made martyrs to dys-
pepsia all our days.
"Many beliefs are merely absurd
without being dangerous. Hair, for
instance, is composed of almost the
same material as the finger nails, and
it is perfectly dead. Cutting the ends
of it cannot possibly make it grow, al
though it does prevent the hair from
splitting up; nor can the hair become
white in a night, any more than a
wig. When novelists, too, by the
way describe PERSONS hair as stand
on end, they speak of phenomenon
that is perfectly impossible. Many of
the lower animals have little muscles
attached to the hair by which they can
erect them; human beings have no
such muscles, nor any other means of
making the hair stand on end except
their hands or comb and BRUSH"