The Ketchum keystone. [volume] (Ketchum, Idaho) 1885-1899, 1897-07-31
ABSURD BELIEFS.
One Reason Why Medical Inn
posters Prosper.

Credulity and Ignoranee Of soAs
People Make Then Easy Victims
for the Fakirs to Practice
Their Wiles Upon.
"Nine 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 watch, and again re-
placed in the socket precisely az it was
before. A moments reflection ought
to show anyone how impossible this
would be. As 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 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 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 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 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
squeezes the blood vessels and forces
lot more blood into the lungs than can
be accommodated. They become regu-
larly flooded and gorged, and the result
is really fever, though we call it a
cold.
1T seems small thing to make q
mistake about the value of beef tea to
a sick man; but can assure you that
hundreds of lives have been lost under
the popular error that beef tea is a
food. It is nothing more
than water in which the pleasant and
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. .s
''Very similar is the belief that an
egg is as good as pound of meat. II
you feed yourself on eggs according to
his absurd theory, you will simply
shrivel up into skin and bone. The real
value of IN. 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
lbout the liver. l dare say that a mill
ion of money is spent every year on the
ivers of Great Britain and about nine
lundred thousand of that sum does
harm instead of good. The liver is sub
ect to about one hundred diseases, and
he cure for any one of these may in
ensify any other of the ninety-nine.
TO take one case as an example: The
iyer may be making too much bile, or it
nay be making too little. Obviously,
he remedy for one of these disorders
would make the other worse than ever.
80 that when a person recommends
as being good for the liver,
ust think that it may be good for his
iver. but not for yours. ..s.
"Women are far worse than men in |
heir beliefs about the body and its all
very 100 children who die under
ne year old so are actually killed |
through the mothers belief that |
God is not nourishing unless it is solid. |
they don't understand that milk has
n immense amount of solid matter
issolved in it, as sugar is dissolved in
yater; and SO they give the unfortun-
tie children cornfour and bread, which
hey can no more digest than they can
igest iron nails. The result is short |
ife of misery and then death, while
hose 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
tance, is composed of almost the same
material as the finger nails, and it is
dead. Cutting the ends of
cannot possibly make it grow, al
hough it does prevent the hair from
plitting up; nor can the hair become
White in night, any more than wig.
Vhen novelists, too, by the way de-
cribe persons hair as standing on
nd they speak of a phenomenon that is
impossible. Many of the low
r animals have little muscles attached
0 the hairs by which they can erect
hem, but human beings have no such
,uscles, nor any other means Of max
,g the hair stand on end except their
ands or comb and brush."-N. Y.
ribune.
FLEEING FROM THE GAR.
! Slav Colony with MaPk3 Of Shackles
rn1 nN