Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages: Including a System of Vegetable Cookery

seed diet, with gentle vomits before and after the fits, chewing bark in the morning and rhubarb at night, with bleeding about the equinoxes, will perfectly cure the gout in persons under fifty, and greatly relieve those farther advanced in life; but must be continued ever after, if such desire to get well. "7. _Gravel._--Soap lees, softened with a little oil of sweet almonds, drunk about a quarter of an ounce twice a day on a fasting stomach; or soap and egg-shell pills, with a total milk and seed diet, and Bristol water beverage, will either totally dissolve the stone in kidneys or bladder, or render it almost as easy as the nail on one's finger, if the patient is under fifty, and much relieve him, even after that age. "In about thirty years' practice, in which I have, in some degree or other, advised this method in proper cases, I have had but two patients in whose total recovery I have been mistaken, and these were both scrofulous cases, where the glands and tubercles were so many, so hard, and so impervious that even the ponderous remedies and diet joined could not discuss them; and they were both also too far gone before they entered upon them;--and I have found deep scrofulous vapors the most obstinate of any of this tribe of these distempers. And indeed nothing can possibly reach such, but the ponderous medicines, joined with a liquid, cool, soft, milk and seed regimen; and if these two do not, in due time, I can boldly affirm it, nothing ever will." Dr. Cheyne goes on to speak of the cure, on similar principles, of a great many other difficult or dangerous diseases, as asthma, pleurisy, hemorrhage, mania, jaundice, bilious colic, rheumatism, scurvy, and venereal disease; but he modestly owns that, in his opinion on these, he does not feel such entire confidence as in the former cases, for want of sufficient experiments. He, however, closes one of his chapters with the following pretty strong statement: "I am morally certain, and am myself entirely convinced, that a milk and