1 m
2 In Ainsli’s Materia Indica, we read : — “ Toddy is a sweet,
3 aperient, most delicious drink. Taken fresh from the tree, early
4 in the morning, before the sun is up, it is certainly a luscious
5 and most pleasant beverage, cooling, refreshing, and nourishing ;
6 it is besides employed for making the best kind of Indian arrack,
7 and yields a great deal of sugar. Europeans, especially delicate
8 females, in India, who are apt to suffer much from constipation,
9 find a cupfull of this toddy, drank every morning at five o’clock,
10 one of the simplest and best remedies they can employ.”
11 It may, perhaps, be of some interest to my readers to cite here
12 a passage from a scientific work, unknown to the greater part of
13 the public, which may serve as a comment on the above subject.
14 This passage is taken from Smith’s Encyclopaedia , Vol. III.,
15 p. 332 : — “ There is no food which may not be made a medicine
16 in one form or another. Water, bread crumbs, eggs, gelatine,
17 and osmazome (brown soup), are thus used. And we find,
18 also, that food, taken improperly or immoderately, may become
19 poisonous ; for instance, flour and sugar, to persons affected with
20 diabetes ; bread and potatoes, in scrofula ; meat, in cases of
21 fever, & c., &c. Again, as civilisation has progressed, several
22 medicaments and poisons have been discovered to be valuable
23 for habitual use as dietetics, spices, stimulants, or cosmetics. In
24 fact, there is scarcely any class of medicines which does not
25 afford some aid to our culinary operations, even resins, acrid
26 poisons, and narcotics not excepted (asafoetida, Peruvian balsam,
27 capsicum, saffron, cherry-laurel, &c.) A certain Tyrolean peasant
28 took arsenic as a stomachic, for which it has also for a long
29 period been used in veterinary medicines*. We enjoy beverages
30 containing poison or narcotics, as tea, hops, alcohol, and carbonic
31 acid. The Russian soldiers drank even nitric acid instead of
32 whiskey. Empyreumatic substances, which contain, according
33 to the opinion of Reichenbach, the strongest poisons, as creosote,
34 picamar, and kapnomar, we enjoy in roasted and smoked meats,
35 * This circumstance confirms the probability of the story of the Affghan
36 physician, whom I mentioned as habitually using arsenic ; and, it will be
37 recollected, that he was also a horse-dealer, and therefore likely to be acquainted
38 with its use in veterinary medicine.