e well and active
"the infusion of 1 oz. of roasted coffee daily will diminish the waste"
going on in the body" "by one-fourth," [Transcriber's note: Quotes as in
the original] and Dr. Christison adds that tea has the same property.
Now this is actual experiment. Lehman weighs the man and finds the fact
from his weight. It is not deduced from any "analysis" of food. All
experience among the sick shows the same thing.[3]

[Sidenote: Cocoa.]

Cocoa is often recommended to the sick in lieu of tea or coffee. But
independently of the fact that English sick very generally dislike
cocoa, it has quite a different effect from tea or coffee. It is an oily
starchy nut having no restorative power at all, but simply increasing
fat. It is pure mockery of the sick, therefore, to call it a substitute
for tea. For any renovating stimulus it has, you might just as well
offer them chestnuts instead of tea.

[Sidenote: Bulk.]

An almost universal error among nurses is in the bulk of the food and
especially the drinks they offer to their patients. Suppose a patient
ordered 4 oz. brandy during the day, how is he to take this if you make
it into four pints with diluting it? The same with tea and beef tea,
with arrowroot, milk, &c. You have not increased the nourishment, you
have not increased the renovating power of these articles, by increasing
their bulk,--you have very likely diminished both by giving the
patient's digestion more to do, and most likely of all, the patient will
leave half of what he has been ordered to take, because he cannot
swallow the bulk with which you have been pleased to invest it. It
requires very nice observation and care (and meets with hardly any) to
determine what will not be too thick or strong for the patient to take,
while giving him no more than the bulk which he is able to swallow.

FOOTNOTES:

[1]
[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 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