“DO WE?”

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXII, Issue 827, 16 April 1910, Page 2

“DO WE?”

Do we eat too much meat ? The doctors, or at all events, a good many of them, say we do. Indeed, some prominent medical men declare that nearly all cases of illness are due to eating too much meat —and too much of everything. Dr. Keith, author of that valuable little book, “ A Plea for a Simpler Fife,” and who recently passed away at Edinburgh, was never tired of telling his patients that it they ate less, and avoided alcohol, they would always be well. This remarkable practitioner never prescribed medicine if he could possibly help it. He did not believe in drugs, but he believed firmly in the efficacy of abstinence in illness. “Go to bed and stop there till you are better,” he would say ; avoid stimulants, eat nothing, drink plenty of cold water. His fellow practitioners often chaffed him. They called him “ the starvation doctor.” Some of them would recommend him to ‘‘eat a good beef-steak and drink a pint of burgundy,” others said they would sooner be dead than follow his example. “ They all died long ago,” the old doctor would say. He himself lived to be 91. The late Sir Henry Thompson shared Dr Keith’s views on abstinence in sickness. Both men thought that the English people eat too much meat.