IN our younger days most of us were brought up to believe that for man the white man in any case white bread was the staff of life. This belief to many has long since been exploded In fact it has been proved beyond any doubt that it is impossible to exist, let alone live, for very long on any such “lop-sided food”. Let doctors, millers, bakers or advertising experts who state or think otherwise put it to the test by endeavouring to live on white bread and water alone and they will learn the truth, that they can die, but not live, on any such diet.
The writer once tried the experiment on himself for a fortnight: it turned out to be the most difficult task he ever set himself. It was undertaken in mid-winter, and he, for once at any rate, suffered most severely from hunger, constipation, fatigue, weakness, cold, loss of sleep and weight, and almost gave it up in despair of ever lasting out the fourteen days.
All the buoyant fitness usually associated with a fourteen days fast was absent. It lead me to appreciate the challenge made many years later by Dr. Bertrand P. Allinson to Sir Thomas Holder to live “exclusively on a diet of ordinary white bread and water for a month, while he [Dr. Allinson] would keep him company on a diet of wholemeal bread and water, and then write his epitaph”.
Of the many advertising slogans of the present day, perhaps none is more popular than “It pays to advertise”. It certainly does. The brewers advertisements at the present time provide a good illustration. The scientific teachings from the text books regarding the detrimental effects of alcohol on the human system, as given in our public schools to-day, give the lie direct to the brewers advertisements which the children see on the hoardings outside.
It also shows how the rate payers money can be washed and a C3 nation produced. The very food that would tend to build up an A1 nation is destroyed in the production of both alcohol and white bread. The parents may drink the beer and the children eat the white bread to their detriment, while perfect food in the shape of wholemeal bread, made solely from the whole wheat berry, should be available to all.
The truth should be taught in our public schools. Surely it is more important that English children should learn what constitutes a perfect food, that will keep body and soul together, rather than how many wives Henry VIII had! And, it may be asked, how much better informed are the majority of adults than the children?
There is no doubt that the nations money could not be put to a better purpose than in producing and advertising a true “Staff of Life”. At present the nation is in a fog regarding what is and what is not the perfect food to make and keep us fit.
The public is being offered countless fancy breads with fancy names at fancy prices. Some are composed of white flour plus a large or small quantity of germ, or other by-products from the milling process, known as offals, usually used for the feeding of cattle; while in other cases all kinds of “wonderful” ingredients have been added to the white flour.
To the uninitiated the analytical reports, supplied with same, look quite O.K., but it is not pure wholemeal bread, or anything like it. The foundation of the majority is composed of chemically bleached, constipating, snow-white flour. Many of the brown breads also on the market are composed of wholemeal flour with added offal.
After all this, it may be asked, “How are we to get the genuine article pure wholemeal bread?” Well, the best of all ways is to get cleaned white wheat and a hand-mill and grind it oneself and bake the bread at home. Many people still do this, but the majority will consider it to be quite impracticable.
There are, however, many things to be said in its favour. One knows that one is getting the genuine article and also that nothing has been taken from or added to the meal. That the meal has not been heated in the milling by either the roller or stone process, so that it will keep like ordinary white flour pure starch has the reputation of doing. Further, the ground wheat is free from the powdered stone which is inseparable from flour produced by the stone milling process. This is the reason why the stones require to be recut fairly often.
In stone milling, to grind the bran into fine particles in one operation is almost impossible for two reasons already mentioned. The closer the stones are set, the finer the bran will be ground; but at the expense of wear on the stones and undue heating of the flour, which may become in the process too hot to handle, and if care is not taken to properly cool, will not keep many days. To get over the latter trouble in the past, the wheat was first ground, the coarsest of the bran sifted out, reground, and once again mixed with the flour.
This, however, does not result in the production of very finely ground flour. The “coarsest” of the bran, however, in many flours has not only been sifted out but left out altogether. With the latest milling process, without stones or rollers, such as employed by the “Pitman” Health Food Co., all these difficulties are overcome and a flour made from white English wheat that is almost as white in appearance and fine in texture as ordinary white flour. The wheat is milled by one process to flour, more finely ground than wholemeal flour has ever previously been offered. It leaves the mill quite cold, in nothing like the risky heated condition of flour when stone ground.
This fitness and colour have doubtless done much to make wholemeal flour popular. This English flour, although it has not the strength of Manitoba, is noted for its flavour and whiteness and is unsurpassed for the making of biscuits, cakes and both short and puff pastry. In fact it is about the only wholemeal flour from which puff pastry can be made. The reason being that puff paste is produced, as every good housewife knows, by the continual rolling out of the paste and spreading same with fresh butter or other tough fat. When made with white flour, each fold of the paste should produce a leaf of the crust.
This action is destroyed when ordinary wholemeal flour is used, owing to the particles of bran present tending to soak up the fat when heated. The fat is thus drained from one fold to another and the flaky effect destroyed. The Vitaland new process wholemeal pastry flour, owing to the bran being finely ground, overcomes this difficulty and a flaky pie-crust is obtained. For making the finest wholemeal bread this same flour. is combined with finest Canadian Manitoba wheat. Thus flavour, colour and strength are combined and a perfect loaf secured.
History records the fact that wheat was ground with stones in Biblical times. We should have improved somewhat on this process after nearly two thousand years. Doubtless also we shall improve on present methods in the future. In the meantime, let us have no doubt about what should be and now is undoubtedly the Staff of Life.
All cures of diseases are effected by Nature; art is only her assistant and cures but by her means.
In the whole catalogue of diseases there is none, from the most violent inflammatory fever to the putrid plague, from suppressions to pro-fluvia, from dynamic diseases to dyscrasias, that has not been cured by Nature alone.
The internal curative power is most conspicuous in those wonderful changes which are often produced by it alone, in quite an unexpected and most surprising manner, to wit in crisis, which entirely remove or alter severe chronic maladies that have withstood for a long time all artificial means. The patient whom we in the evening considered fated to death, has in the night a profuse perspiration, and we find him in the morning out of danger.
In a severe acute disease, which we combat in vain by our remedies, suddenly an abscess is formed in some external part, and the disease is gone. The greatest triumph yet of the curative power of Nature is manifested in her conquering the multifarious, most opposite and injudicious methods of medical treatment.
Is it not of daily occurrence that sick people living in the country get well without any assistance, in spite of the most perverse treatment? And even as regards rational treatment, I have long since become convinced, that the greater number of cures are not due to the labours of the physician, but to Nature; the patients get well with the physician assisting, but by far the least solely by his assistance.
Fever itself is nothing else than a curative process which brings about critical alterations, termination, and a restoration from disturbance to healthy equilibrium in many case, Nature uses no other means than fever to cure diseases. Therefore the office of art is by no means to remove fever itself, but solely to guide its operation in such a manner, that it attains the end of effecting a perfect crisis. -HUFELAND, The Art of Prolonging.
Henry followed in his father's footsteps, obtaining his Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery from Durham in 1891. At the age of 27 he arrived in Melbourne in April 1894 aboard the Port Albert. He was registered as a medical practitioner in Victoria on 4 May 1894.
It appears that Dr Cook already believed in homœopathy, possibly because of his father's influence, as in 1895 Dr Cook took the position of Resident Surgeon of the Melbourne Homœopathic Hospital . (This position was previously held by Dr James Cook, unrelated, who resigned in March 1895). He was listed in the 1896 & 1897 editions of the Melbourne Post Office Directory as being Resident Medical Officer at the Melbourne Homœopathic Hospital, but not in the 1898 edition.
In 1901 he moved to Sale in Eastern Victoria, where he ran a practice in York Street. By 1909 his practice was at Wyndham Street, Shepparton.
By 1919 he had moved to 2 Studley Park Road, Kew, where he died on 7 May, 1923.