A Handbook of Health

The preface of A Handbook of Health by Woods Hutchinson looks upon the human body as the most perfect, most ingeniously economical, and most beautiful of living machines, and says the author has attempted to write a little handbook of practical instruction for the running of it. A passage says that the salivary juice contains a ferment, or digestive substance (ptyalin), which possesses the power of turning the starch in our food into sugar.

The text says starchy foods, like bread, biscuit, crackers, cake, and pastry, are really the only ones which require such thorough and elaborate chewing as we sometimes hear urged. A passage says the only harm done by freckles is to your vanity, and that freckles and sunburn are protective actions on nature's part, filling the skin with coloring matter, or pigment. Definitions in the text give Breath as air taken in or sent out in respiration, with that breathed out containing carbon dioxid, watery vapor, and various impurities, and Car'bon di ox'id as a gas formed of carbon and oxygen.