To effect this, certain regulations in eating and drinking are far better preventives than any medicine, or even occasional bleedings. The latter method is particularly unsafe. After bleeding from the arm, new blood is often made more rapidly than under other circumstances, and so may become, before a person is well aware of it, very abundant, with a dangerous pressure on the weak vessels. The subject of such a practice is very apt to rely on the abstraction of blood for safety, and take no care otherwise of himself. Besides, he has no accurate means of knowing when the pressure of the blood is becoming dangerously great. The periodical bleeding from piles is a very different matter. They often act as a safety-valve to the high pressure from within, and regulate themselves on mechanical principles. Full-blooded persons, past middle life, and with a predisposition to apoplexy, should never try to remove such a safety-valve.
As soon as old age puts a decided check on the amount of daily exercise, it is time to put a decided check on the amount of food daily consumed. If the supply of new matter is greater than the waste of the old, an accumulation of surplus blood must be the result. The principle is an important one, yet it is little known and less practised. Men well past middle life, who do not exercise half as much as in their younger years, often eat as freely of highly-nutritious food as they ever did. Such a course is very dangerous. The tension on the vascular system must not be increased, but diminished, if the risk of an apoplectic stroke would be avoided.
The kind of food best adapted to keep down superfluous blood is the vegetable. Animal food makes blood with dangerous rapidity, nearly all its substance dissolving for this purpose in the stomach. Laboring-men, however, may eat of animal food in moderation, as the exercise of their muscles wastes their substance largely, requiring a good deal of blood to make up for the wear.
The amount of vegetable food should not be so great as in middle life. The true rule is, not to eat to entire satiety. Even those of younger years and sedentary habits will feel lighter and better in every way by leaving the table a little hungry.
All strong liquors are unsuited to those with an apoplectic tendency. One of their prominent effects, as we have seen, is to cause a degeneration in the coating of the blood-vessels, and another is to move more blood than ordinary upon the brain.
