tics is usually vegetarian, and gives excellent results.

Never swallow skin, core, seeds or kernels of fruits, many of which,
excellent otherwise, are forbidden because of the irritation caused to
stomach and bowels by their seeds or skins.

Bromides are said to give better results if salt is not taken. A little may
be used in cooking, if, as is usually the case, the patient has to eat at
the common table, but condiments are unnecessary and often irritating to
delicate stomachs.

The diet of nervous dyspeptics must be very simple, and though it is trying
and monotonous to forgo harmful dainties in favour of wholesome dishes, it
is but one of the many limitations Nature inflicts on neuropaths. Many an
epileptic, after believing himself cured, has brought on a severe attack by
an imprudent meal. La Rochefoucauld says: "Preserving the health by too
strict a regimen is a wearisome malady", but it is open to all men to
choose whether they will endure the remedy or the disease.

Most men eat six times the minimum and twice the optimum quantity of food
per day. For every one who starves, hundreds gorge themselves to death.
"Food kills more than famine", and the poor, who eat sparsely from
necessity, suffer far less from gout, cancer, rheumatism and other
food-aggravated diseases than the rich.

Most books give detailed lists of foods to be eaten and to be avoided, but
this we believe is productive of little good.

Let the patient eat a mixed diet, well and suitably cooked, taking what he
fancies in reason, masticating everything thoroughly, and gradually
eliminating foods which experience teaches him are difficult for him to
digest.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XIV

CONSTIPATION

"Causing a symptom to disappear is seldom the cure of
any ill; the true course is to _prevent_ the symptom."

Rings of muscle cause wormlike movements of the bowels, and so propel
forward food and waste. Weakening of these muscles or their nerve controls
from any cause, results in a "condition of the bowels in which motions
occur only when provoked by medicines or injections". In some cases though
motions occur freely, food ingested is retained too long in the digestive
tract.

The blood extracts what water it needs from the fluid waste in the large
bowel, but when the weak muscles allow this to remain too long, an excess
of moisture is removed, leaving hard, dry masses, painful to pass.

When the faeces reac