-side till he is so sickened with the sight of it, that he cannot
eat it at all.

[23]

[Sidenote: Intelligent cravings of particular sick for particular
articles of diet.]

In the diseases produced by bad food, such as scorbutic dysentery and
diarrhoea, the patient's stomach often craves for and digests things,
some of which certainly would be laid down in no dietary that ever was
invented for sick, and especially not for such sick. These are fruit,
pickles, jams, gingerbread, fat of ham or of bacon, suet, cheese,
butter, milk. These cases I have seen not by ones, nor by tens, but by
hundreds. And the patient's stomach was right and the book was wrong.
The articles craved for, in these cases, might have been principally
arranged under the two heads of fat and vegetable acids.

There is often a marked difference between men and women in this matter
of sick feeding. Women's digestion is generally slower.

[24] It is made a frequent recommendation to persons about to incur
great exhaustion, either from the nature of the service or from their
being not in a state fit for it, to eat a piece of bread before they go.
I wish the recommenders would themselves try the experiment of
substituting a piece of bread for a cup of tea or coffee or beef tea as
a refresher. They would find it a very poor comfort. When soldiers have
to set out fasting on fatiguing duty, when nurses have to go fasting in
to their patients, it is a hot restorative they want, and ought to have,
before they go, not a cold bit of bread. And dreadful have been the
consequences of neglecting this. If they can take a bit of bread _with_
the hot cup of tea, so much the better, but not _instead_ of it. The
fact that there is more nourishment in bread than in almost anything
else has probably induced the mistake. That it is a fatal mistake there
is no doubt. It seems, though very little is known on the subject, that
what "assimilates" itself directly and with the least trouble of
digestion with the human body is the best for the above circumstances.
Bread requires two or three processes of assimilation, before it becomes
like the human body.

The almost universal testimony of English men and women who have
undergone great fatigue, such as riding long journeys without stopping,
or sitting up for several nights in succession, is that they could do it
best upon an occasional cup of tea--and nothing else.

Let experience, not theory, decide upon this as upon all