B

The Doctor in Love

EWITCHING, beauteous, cruel Jane McSparrow!
My bosom's lord no longer its own lord is;
Inspired by thee, Dan Cupid's fatal arrow
Has pierced my apex cordis.

No knock I heed, nor answer any call;

No action have in ilium or duodenum ;

Spleen, pancreas, colon, stomach, liver, all

Have something very odd in 'em.

My outward size is fitted to deceive;

By stays and padding I'm a hollow sham;

My inward sighs with painful labor heave
My wasted diaphragm.

My brachials are gone, my deltoid dwindles;
This pectoralis major 's all unreal;

These shanks, so shapely once, are now but spindles,
From lack of popliteal.

Masseters and molars have no further use;

For weeks a score I 've fed on thinest gruel;

Gone are the functions of the gastric juice,
For want of gastric fuel.

Of best prescriptions I have taken twenty;

SPTS. VIN. GAL.-(I hardly dare exhibit 'em); DECOCT. HORD. OCT. I, TER IN DIE; SPIRITUS FRUMENTIE, CAPE AB LIBITUM.

But all in vain: a subject, a cadaver,

I hasten toward that tenement so narrow;

Foredoomed I am, since fated not to have her

Sweet, cruel, Jane McSparrow.

DR. ANDREW MCFARLAND.

The Art of Preserving Health

DIET

NOUGH of air. A desert subject now, Rougher and wilder, rises to my sight. A barren waste, where not a garland grows To bind the Muse's brow; not even a proud Stupendous solitude frowns o'er the heath, To rouse a noble horror in the soul: But rugged paths fatigue, and error leads Through endles labyrinths the devious feet. Farewell, etherial fields! the humbler arts Of life; the table and the homely gods Demand my song. Elysian gales, adieu!

The blood, the fountain whence the spirits flow,

The generous stream that waters every part,
And motion, vigor, and warm life conveys

To every particle that moves or lives;
This vital fluid, through unnumbered tubes
Poured by the heart, and to the heart again
Refunded; scourged forever round and round;
Enraged with heat and toil, at last forgets
Its balmy nature; virulent and thin

It grows and now, but that a thousand gates
Are open to its flight, it would destroy
The parts it cherished and repaired before.
Besides, the flexible and tender tubes
Melt in the mildest, most nectareous tide
That ripening nature rolls; as in the stream
Its crumbling banks; but what the vital force
Of plastic fluids hourly batters down,
That very force those plastic particles
Rebuild: so mutable the state of man.
For this the watchful appetite was given,

Daily with fresh materials to repair

This unavoidable expense of life,

This necessary waste of flesh and blood.
Hence the concoctive powers, with various art,
Subdue the cruder aliments to chyle;

The chyle to blood: the foamy purple tide

To liquors, which through finer arteries
To different parts their winding course pursue;
To try new changes, and new forms put on,
Or for the public, or some private use.

Nothing so foreign but the athletic hind
Can labor into blood. The hungry meal
Alone he fears, or aliments too thin;
By violent powers too easily subdued,
Too soon expelled. His daily labor thaws
To friendly chyle the most rebellious mass
That salt can harden, or the smoke of years;
Nor does his gorge the lucious bacon rue,
Nor that which Cestria sends, tenacious paste
Of solid milk. But ye of softer clay,

Infirm and delicate! and ye who waste

With pale and bloated sloth the tedious day!
Avoid the stubborn aliment, avoid

The full repast; and let sagacious age

Grow wiser, lessoned by the dropping teeth.
Half subtilized to chyle, the liquid food
Readiest obeys the assimilating powers
And soon the tender vegetable mass
Relents; and soon the young of those that tread
The steadfast earth, or cleave the green abyss,
Or pathless sky. And if the steer must fall,
In youth and sanguine vigor let him die ;
Nor stay till rigid age or heavy ails
Absolve him ill requited from the yoke.
Some with high forage and luxuriant ease
Indulge the veteran ox; but wiser thou,
From the bald mountain or the barren downs,
Expect the flocks by frugal nature fed;
A race of purer blood, with exercise
Refined and scanty fare: for, old or yo

The stalled are never healthy; nor the crammed. Not all the culinary arts can tame,

To wholesome food, the abominable growth

Of rest and gluttony; the prudent taste

Rejects, like bane, such loathsome lusciousness. The languid stomach curses even the pure Delicious fat, and all the race of oil :

For more the oily aliments relax

Its feeble tone; and with the eager lymph
(Fond to incorporate with all it meets)
Coyly they mix, and shun with slippery wiles
The wooed embrace. The irresoluble oil,
So gentle late and blandishing, in floods

Of rancid bile o 'erflows: what tumults hence,
What horrors rise, were nauseous to relate.
Choose leaner viands, ye whose jovial make
Too fast the gummy nutriment imbibes :
Choose sober meals; and rouse to active life
Your cumbrous clay; nor on the enfeebling down,
Irresolute, protract the morning hours.

But let the man whose bones are thinly clad,
With cheerful ease and succulent repast
Improve his habit if he can; for each
Extreme departs from perfect sanity.

I could relate what table this demands
Or that complexion; what the various powers
Of various foods, but fifty years would roll,

And fifty more before the tale were done.

Besides there often lurks some nameless, strange,

Peculiar thing; nor on the skin displayed,

Felt in the pulse, nor in the habit seen;

Which finds a poison in the food that most

The temperature effects. There are, whose blood Impetuous rages through the turgid veins,

Who better bear the fiery fruits of Ind

Than the moist melon, or pale cucumber.

Of chilly nature others fly the board

Supplied with slaughter, and the vernal powers,

For cooler, kinder sustenance, implore.
Some e'en the generous nutriment detest

Which, in the shell, the sleeping embryo rears.
Some, more unhappy still, repent the gifts
Of Pales; soft, delicious, and benign:
The balmy quintessence of every flower,
And every grateful herb that decks the spring:
The fostering dew of tender sprouting life;
The best refection of declining age;

The kind restorative of those who lie

Half dead and panting, from the doubtful strife
Of nature struggling in the grasp of death.
Try all the bounties of this fertile globe,
There is not such a salutary food
As suits with every stomach. But (except,
Amid the mingled mass of fish and fowl,
And boiled and baked, you hesitate by which
You sunk oppressed, or whether not by all)
Taught by experience soon you may discern
What pleases, what offends. Avoid the cates
That lull the sickened appetite too long;

Or heave with feverish flushings all the face,
Burn in the palms, and parch the roughening tongue;
Or much diminish or too much increase

The expense which Nature's wise economy,
Without or waste or avarice, maintains.
Such cates adjured, let prowling hunger loose,
And bid the curious palate roam at will;
They scarce can err amid the various stores
That burst the teeming entrails of the world.

Led by sagacious taste, the ruthless king
Of beasts on blood and slaughter only lives;
The tiger, formed alike to cruel meals,
Would at the manger starve: of milder seeds
The generous horse to herbage and to grain
Confines his wish; though fabling Greece resound
The Thracian steeds, with human carnage wild.
Prompted by instinct's never erring power,
Each creature knows its proper aliment;
But man, the inhabitant of every clime,
With all the commoners of nature feeds.
Directed, bounded by this power within,