, and want of proper exercise, are correctly assigned as
two great causes of this disease; the former as respects the quantity,
quality, time and manner of taking food, and the latter as it affects
persons of a sedentary habit. These causes lead to actual dyspepsia, or
a bad concoction of the food in the stomach, from whence the evils
described arise; and which are sufficient of themselves, without adding
to the list those affections, dependant upon diseases of other organs,
although occupying the stomach as their seat, and all of which our
author has indiscriminately classed under _his sweeping term_,
dyspepsia. A very common error of diet, as respects the time and manner
of taking food, is not treated of with sufficient force, when its
baneful tendency is considered:--the custom that prevails, of dining
within a very short period, sometimes only a few minutes, and returning
immediately to the avocations of the day; the food is sent to the
stomach only half masticated, and the system directly subjected to
exertion, during which, the process of digestion cannot take place. If
we make a hearty meal, and at once proceed to labour of any kind, the
food remains for hours in an unaltered state; whereas, if we give a
short repose to our bodies, by assuming an easy posture, and partially
dismissing the remembrance of past, and the prospect of future cares,
allowing, in fact, the whole business of life a short rest, as far as
may be, the stomach will perform its office with ease and certainty. Mr.
Halsted devotes one section to the consideration "of the particular
condition of the stomach in dyspepsia;" and as he confesses that doctors
differ on this subject, he kindly lends his assistance to relieve their
indecision, by roundly asserting "that it consists mainly, in a debility
or loss of power of action, in the muscular coat of the stomach." That a
feebleness of the system may affect the muscular coat of the stomach,
is far from a novel doctrine; but the idea that dyspepsia _mainly_
depends upon this cause, is certainly as new as it is startling: the
very meaning of the word would dispose us to consider that any want of
action in the stomach, preventing the due concoction, or the breaking
down of aliment for the purposes of nourishment to the frame, would
apply to it, and, strictly speaking, it would; not that the muscular
coat is alone, or the most powerful agent, in reducing the food to pulp
or chyme; it is one of the many for