breakfast, which many, when the weather permits it, take in open air.
Most people drink coffee or chocolate. Without reprobating these two articles, I shall only observe that coffee aggravates hepatic disorders, attended with a disposition to inflammation, particularly when the presence of gall-stones excites pain or irritation; it produces in the liver a burning and pungent sensation, which often disappears as soon as patients adopt some milder mode of breakfasting, such as soup, an infusion of balm, or other harmless beverage. Coffee, in one word, should never be allowed to invalids, whose abdominal organs give such signs of inflammation or sensibility to the touch, as to require leeches, or any other part of the antiphlogistic treatment, so often necessary with our patients.
Chocolate does not produce the same irritative effects as coffee, so remarkable for the subtility of its aromatic principles, and still less a plain decoction of cocoa; but few people digest well and relish chocolate for any length of time, as they do coffee or tea.
Tea has been in general proscribed in most German watering-places, at least in those of Bohemia. Not being a national beverage, physicians and patients have so seldom a personal experience of it, that in the numberless works published on mineral waters, so minute on other articles of diet, nothing or very little is said about tea. That infusion having been found incompatible with the use of more essentially
