Note 23 — VII. WHAT FOOD?
Reading edition · Edition 2
Intelligent cravings of particular sick for particular articles of diet.
In the diseases produced by bad food, such as scorbutic dysentery and diarrhœa, 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.