The record-union. [volume] (Sacramento, Calif.) 1891-1903, 1897-06-21
ABSURD POPULAR BELIEFS.
The Reason Why Medical Fakirs
Prosper From Answers.

Mine out of ten people believe" said
a surgeon to the writer, that the eye
can be taken out for repairs, just like
the works of a watch, and again re-
placed in the socket precisely as it
was before. A moments reflection
ought 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.
Beside, it is connected with the brain
by a thick nerve which cannot be
stretched, and it is also connected with
the inside of the skull by blood-vessels,
and if these were cut they could never
be reunited. Perhaps time will come
when a dead man can be restored to
life; but you may feel perfectly sure
that the removal and the restoration of
the eye is a surgical feat that will never
be performed.
Another extraordinary popular be-
lief is that respecting the nature of a
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 a mustard
plctS LEI 70 uIdW Jul Tic COlu III ISdl-
ity the cold is Simply an excess of heat
inside, and the mustard plaster is in
tended to draw out the heat What
happens when you get q cold is that
the cooling of the outside of the body
squeezes the blood-vessels and forces a
lot more blood into the lungs than can
be accommodated They become reg
ularly flooded and gorged, and the re-
suit is really a fever, though we call it
a cold
1T seems a small thing to make a
mistake about 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
a mixture of whisky and China tea
But it has scarcely a particle of nutri-
ment, and both doctors and public have
starved to death more people than Ia
like to state through believing that it
has.
Very similar is the belief that an
egg is as good as pound of meat. If
you feed yourself on eggs according to
this absurd theory, you will simply
shrivel up into skin and bone The real
value of an egg is it's 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 l dare say that a
million 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 100 diseases,
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 a 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 its all
ments. 1 am quite sure that out of
every 100 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 has an i'm
mense amount of solid matter dissolved
in it, as sugar is dissolved in water:
and so they give the unfortunate chill
dren contour and bread, which they
can no more digest than tney could di-
gest iron nails The result is a short
life of misery ana then death, while