Yet it is the "taste" (Flavor) of food that arouses the appetite. As the French say, "the appetite comes while we are eating." Medical men of various countries in former times paid special attention to the restoration of a patient's appetite. In more recent text books less attention is paid to appetite as a symptom; but Prof. Pawlow's experiments have again, and for all time, demonstrated its importance.
Those young ladies who think it is "nice" and "feminine" to pretend to have no appetite should read the Pawlow papers, and have all that nonsense knocked out of their heads. A poor appetite is a danger signal--a thing to arouse pity and to be cured, just like a headache or a fever.
"Appetite juice" is one of the suggestive names Professor Pawlow gives to the fluid which digests food in the stomach. There is little or none of it for the man who eats without noticing his food, unable to distract his thoughts from his work, as so often happens to those who live in the midst of the incessant turmoil of large cities. This inattention to the act of eating (to the Flavor of the food) prepares the way for digestive disturbances with all the various diseases following them. No medical treatment can help such a patient--unless he reforms and eats rationally.
Thus, the studies of Dr. Pawlow fully bear out my contention as to the Vital Importance of Flavor in Food.
There is one more of his observations to which superlative importance attaches. One of his experiments on dogs showed that if food was given gradually in small quantities, it led to the secretion of much stronger gastric juice than when the animal was allowed to eat the whole ration at once.
This was a laboratory demonstration of the wisdom of the best medical treatment of a weak stomach; "and such a regulation of diet," continues the professor, "is all the more necessary, since, in the commonest disorders of the stomach, only the surface layers of the mucous membrane are affected. It may, consequently, happen that the sensory surface of the stomach, which should take up the stimulus of the chemical excitant, is not able to fulfil its duty, and the period of chemical secretion, which ordinarily lasts for a long time, is for the most part disturbed, or even wholly absent. A strong psychic excitation, a keen feeling of appetite, may evoke the secretory impulse in the central nervous system and send it unhindered to the glands which lie in the deeper as yet unaffected layers of mucous membrane."