The Cambria freeman. [volume] (Ebensburg, Pa.) 1867-1938, 1897-09-03
ABSURD BELIEFS.
One Reason Why Medical Inn
posters Prosper.
Creduiity and Ignorance of Some
People Make Them Easy Victims
for the Fakirs to Practice
Their wiIes Upon.

for the Fakirs to Practice
Their WiIes Upon.
Nine out of ten people believe" said
"A surgeon to the writer, that the eye
can be taken ou- for repairs, just like
the works of watch, and again re-
.laced in the socket precisely AS IL was
uefore. y moments reflection ought
~ show anyone how impossible this
would Toe. As a matter of fact, the eve
- held in place by no fewer than san
taut muscles, and, in order To turn II
uut of the socket, at least four OF these
would have Ia Toe cut through. BESIDES,
At is connected with the brain by a
Ihick nerve which cannot be stretched,
and il is also connected with the inside
of the skull Ly blood-vessels, and il
these were cut they could never be re-
united. Perhaps "a time will come when
a dead man can be restored To life; but
you may feel perfectly sure that the re-
moval and restoration of the eye is a
surgical feat that will never be per
formed.
Another extraordinary popular be
lief is that respecting the nature of
common cold. You will hear the most
intelligent men saying that ii is due 10
in excess of cold inside your body. and
they will advise you To u.s. Il mustard
plaster to draw out the cold In re
ality 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 cold il hat the
cooling OF the outside of the body
squeezcs the blood vessels and forces d
lot more blood into the lungs than can
be accommodated, They become regu-
larry flooded and gorged, and the result
is really Il fever, though We call il
cold
1t seems small thing To make a
mistake about the value OF beef tea To
IA sick man; but l can assure you that
hundreds of lives have been lost under
the popular error that beef tea is Il
nnurishing food. 1t is nothing more
than water in which the pleasant and
stimulating salts of the beef are dis
solved and has the same effect as Il mix
ture of whisky and China tea. But il
has scarcely a particle of nutriment.
and both doctors and public have
starved to death more people than I'd
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
shriNel up into skin and bone. The real
value of egg is its weight in good
beef; so that il 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. | dare say that :. mil
lion of money is spent every year on the
lIVers of Great Britain and about nine
hundred thousand of shat sum does
harm instead of good. The liver is sub
jcct To about one hundred diseases, and
the cure for any one of these may in
tensify any other of the ninety-nine.
To take one case as an example: The
liver may be making too much bile. or il
may br making too little. Obviously.
the remedy for one OF these disorders
would make the other worse than ever
So that when person recommends
something as being good for the liver
Just think that it may toe good for his
liver, but not for yours.
Women are far worse than men in
ments. | am quite sure that out of
every 100 children who die under
one year old 50 are actually killed
through the mothers belief that
food il not nourishing unless il is solid.
They don't understand that milk has
an immense amount of solid matter
dissolved in ii, as sugar is dissolved i'm
water; and so they give the unfortun-
ate children corntiour and bread " hich
they can 10 more digest than they can
digest iron nails. The result is a short
life of misery and then death. while
made martyrs to dyspepsia all our days
Many beliefs are merely absurd
without being dangerous. Hair. for in
stance, is composed of almost the same
material as the finger nails. and il is
perfectly dead. Cutting the ends of
At cannot possibly make il grow. al
though 1t does prevent the hair from
splitting up; nor can the hair become
white in night, any more than a wig
When novelists, too, by the way de
scribe persons hair as standing on
end they speak of a phenomenon that il
perfectly impossible. Many of the low
er animals have little muscles attached
to the hairs by which they can erect
them, but human beings have no such
muscles, nor any other means OF max
ing the hair stand on end except their
hands or eomb and brush.'-N. Y.
Trihune