It is a common experience amongst rheumatic patients, that they cannot
take lentils, haricots and some other foods; sometimes, even eggs and milk
are inadmissible. This is not for the alleged reason that they contain
purins, or as some misname it, uric acid; but because the digestive organs
are unequal to the task. It will be seen, that although Dr. Haig's
hypothesis of uric acid as a cause of gout and some other diseases is
disputed by many eminent physicians, his treatment by excluding flesh and
other foods which contain purins, and also pulse, which is difficult of
digestion by the weakly, is a wise one. It has proved of the greatest
value in very many cases.

Digestion and nutrition is a complex process, and it may be faulty at
various stages and in several ways; there may be either deficient or
excessive secretions or inaction. Thus there are exceptions, where gouty
symptoms, including an excessive quantity of urates in the urine, have
only been relieved by the giving up of milk foods or starch foods (see
_Lancet_, 1900, I., p. 1, and 1903, I., p. 1059).

Those particularly interested in the subject of the purins and gout are
referred to the lecture on "The meaning of uric acid and the urates," by
Dr. Woods-Hutchinson, in the _Lancet_, 1903, I., p. 288, and the
discussion on "The Chemical Pathology of Gout" before the British Medical
Association at Oxford (see _British Medical Journal_, 1904, II., p. 740).

Dr. George S. Keith, in "Fads of an Old Physician," has a chapter on
rheumatic fever; he says that the disease is much more common than it was
fifty years ago. He has never met with it in the young or old except when
the diet had consisted largely of beef and mutton, and this although he
has been on the outlook for at least forty years for a case of the disease