If you should question your laundress or cook, or your farmer’s wife, you would be appalled to discover what peculiar notions she has of her physical make-up.  It would be interesting and astounding to allow one of these people to draw a chart of her interior machinery, as she supposes it to be.  It would bear as little resemblance to the reality as did the charts of the ancients who antedated Tycho Brahe, Pythagoras, and Copernicus, to the celestial charts of the nineteenth century.  One would note especially the prominence given to certain organs.  The stomach is almost, if not entirely, ignored.  It is a matter for speculation why this valuable factor of the human system should be regarded with some disfavor by the ignorant.  They joyfully admit the existence of the heart, brain and kidneys, and even the liver, and discourse with zestful unction on their own peculiar and special diseases of these organs; but suggest not to them that the stomach is out of sorts.  This is not, in their estimation, a romantic Complaint.  Their specialty is Nerves.  To hear the frequency with which they attribute to these all uncomfortable sensations, one would imagine that the victims were made by a special pattern, like the tongue, of ends of nerves, all super-sensitive.  The Nerves are a mysterious portion of their being, to whose account everything is laid, from extreme irritability and vexation, to nausea and rheumatism.  “My nerves are that sensitive!” is a universal complaint.

It is difficult for the average mind to grasp the reason why the stomach, man’s best friend and worst enemy, should be made of no account, and repudiated with such indignant resentment.  Surely the giddiness occasioned by a tendency of blood to the head is no more romantic than the dizziness induced by gaseous fermentation of matter in the stomach.  The digestive organs should and do receive vast consideration from the medical profession.  How often do we hear it said of some man lying at the point of death that as long as his digestive functions are duly performed there is hope; and how often, after the crisis is past, do we learn from the jubilant doctor that the patient’s stomach was his salvation!  “If that had failed, nothing could have saved him.”

Let me recommend, as the pre-eminent duty of the sensible reader, care of the stomach and the alimentary apparatus.  By care I do not mean dosing.  With too many people the science of hygiene is confined in their imagination and practice to remedial measures.  Of the weightier matters of precaution they reck nothing.  Once in so often they “take a course of physic.”  This is done not so much because it is needed, as on principle, and because they have somewhere heard that it is a good thing to do.  So, although all the digestive functions may be performing their part in a perfectly proper and regular manner, they must be weakened and irritated by draughts which do more harm than good.