Page:Of the Gout - Stukeley - 1734.djvu/99

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or two is highly necessary, and to get into the air as soon as we can. Furious as a lyon the fitt comes one, but retires gentle as a lamb. Your strength returns very speedily, and you find your self in perfect health with pleasure and surprize.

The great indication for a regimen during the intermission of fitts, is to prevent, as much as may be, the growth of these rich, sulphureous and inflammatory salts, in our blood. First, Temperance above all things is necessary, and with that, there is little need of distinction in our meats and drinks, where the vessels are not o'erloaded, but the fibres vigorous. Where they vibrate orderly, the wheels of life go right, Nature expends all she takes and keeps open all the salutary outletts. A starving regimen in a gouty constitution is prejudcial: because there wants fat and oyl for a remedy. It lessens the quantity of salts indeed, but weakens nature in expelling even those that are form'd, and quite subtracts the oyly cure. So that in all things temperance is best. A good stomach which is a blessing, and podagrics generally have it, is like a knife too sharp, may do mischief, without restraint. Cicero in his his epistle to Herennius, says you must eat to live, not live to eat. And so Socrates said of himself Muson. ap. Stobeum. Seneca in his II epistle, forbids us

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