Fat and Blood | Page 5

us, in middle and advanced life, a thinner and
more sallow race, and, possibly, adapted us better to the region in
which we live. The same changes in form are in like manner showing
themselves in the English race in Australia.[7]
Some gain in flesh as life goes on is a frequent thing here as elsewhere,
and usually has no unwholesome meaning. Occasionally we see people
past the age of sixty suddenly taking on fat and becoming at once
unwieldy and feeble, the fat collecting in masses about the belly and
around the joints. Such an increase is sometimes accompanied with
fatty degeneration of the heart and muscles, and with a certain watery
flabbiness in the limbs, which, however, do not pit on pressure.
Alcoholism also gives rise in some people to a vast increase of adipose
tissue, and the sodden, unwholesome fatness of the hard drinker is a
sufficiently well known and unpleasant spectacle. The overgrowth of

inert people who do not exercise enough to use up a healthy amount of
overfed tissues is common enough as an individual peculiarity, but
there are also two other conditions in which fat is apt to be accumulated
to an uncomfortable extent. Thus, in some cases of hysteria where the
patient lies abed owing to her belief that she is unable to move about,
she is apt in time to become enormously stout. This seems to me also to
be favored by the large use of morphia to which such women are prone,
so that I should say that long rest, the hysterical constitution, and the
accompanying resort to morphia make up a group of conditions highly
favorable to increase of fat.
Lastly, there is the class of fat anæmic people, usually women. This
double peculiarity is rather uncommon, but, as the mass of thin-blooded
persons are as a rule thin or losing flesh, there must be something
unusual in that anæmia which goes with gain in flesh.
Bauer[8] thinks that lessened number of blood-corpuscles gives rise to
storing of fat, owing to lessened tissue-combustion. At all events, the
absorption of oxygen diminishes after bleeding, and it used to be well
known that some people grew fat when bled at intervals. Also, it is said
that cattle-breeders in some localities--certainly not in this
country--bleed their cattle to cause increase of fat in the tissues, or of
fat secreted as butter in the milk. These explanations aid us but little to
comprehend what, after all, is only met with in certain persons, and
must therefore involve conditions not common to every one who is
anæmic. Meanwhile, the group of fat anæmics is of the utmost clinical
interest, as I shall by and by point out more distinctly.
There is a popular idea, which has probably passed from the
agriculturist into the common mind of the community, to the effect that
human fat varies,--that some fat is wholesome and some unwholesome,
that there are good fats and bad fats. I remember well an old nurse who
assured me when I was a student that "some fats is fast and some is
fickle, but cod-oil fat is easy squandered."
There are more facts in favor of some such idea than I have place for,
but as yet we have no distinct chemical knowledge as to whether the
fats put on under alcohol or morphia, or rapidly by the use of oils, or

pathologically in fatty degenerations, or in anæmia, vary in their
constituents. It is not at all unlikely that such is the case, and that, for
example, the fat of an obese anæmic person may differ from that of a
fat and florid person. The flabby, relaxed state of many fat people is
possibly due not alone to peculiarities of the fat, but also to want of
tone and tension in the areolar tissues, which, from all that we now
know of them, may be capable of undergoing changes as marked as
those of muscles.
That, however, animals may take on fat which varies in character is
well known to breeders of cattle. "The art of breeding and feeding
stock," says Dr. Letheby,[9] "is to overcome excessive tendency to
accumulation of either surface fat or visceral fat, and at the same time
to produce a fat which will not melt or boil away in cooking. Oily
foods have a tendency to make soft fats which will not bear cooking."
Such differences are also seen between English and American bacon,
the former being much more solid; and we know, also, that the fat of
different animals varies remarkably, and that some, as the fat of hay-fed
horses, is readily worked off. Such facts as these may reasonably be
held to sustain the popular creed as to there being bad fats and good
fats, and they teach us