Daily camera., 1897-08-13
ABSURD BELIEFS.
One Reason Why Medical I'M
posters Prosper.
Credulity md Ignorance of Some
People Make Them Easy Victims
for the Fakirs to Practice
Their Wiles Upon.

"cNine out.of ten people believe" said
surgeon to the writer, "that the eye
can be taken out for repairs, just like
the works of 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 t o be cut through. Besides,
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 re-
united. Perhaps 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 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
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 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 regu-
larly flooded and gorged, and the result
is really a fever, though we call it a
cold
SIT seems small thing to make a
mistake about the value of beef tea to
sick man; but / can assure you that
hundreds of lives have been lost under
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 dis
solved and has the same effect as mix
ture of whisky and China tea. But it
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 10
this absurd theory, you will simply
shrivel up into skin and bone 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 pound of meat.
"Then there is the universal fallacy
about the liver. l dare say 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 sub
iect to about one hundred diseases, and
the cure for any one of these may in
tensify any other of the niDety-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.
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 all
ments. L am quite sure that out Of
oIi who ,lnInr
one year old so are actually killed
through the mothers belief that
food is not nourishing unless it is solid.
They don't understand that milk has
an immense amount Of solid matter
dissolved in it, as sugar is dissolved in
water; sand so they give the unfortun-
ate children cornfiour and bread, which
they can no more digest than they can
digest iron nails. The result is a short
life of misery and then death, while
those of us who manage to survive are
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 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 night, any more than wig
When novelists, too, by the way de-
scribe persons hair as standing on
end they speak of phenomenon that is
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 theil
hands or a comb and brush. IN. Y
Tribune.
A Laplander's Dress.
The operation of dressing in cold