[K] For obvious reasons, I give real names and dates in this chapter.

[L] Even Mr. Graham himself, whom he accidentally met, repeated to him
the same caution!

[M] Or other fruits equal to them. The reader must not forget that she
had already subsisted five years without animal food, and that what she
took of vegetable food was a very small quantity--little more than was
taken by Mr. Robinson.

CHAPTER XCI.

DIETING ON MINCE PIE.

A recent letter from a patient of mine, contains the following
statement: "I met, yesterday, with a poor dyspeptic. He said he felt
very bad indeed, and that he had been _dieting_ for a long time. I asked
him what his diet had been. He said 'Bread and butter, for the morning
meal; beef, etc., for dinner; and nothing at all, for supper, but a
piece of mince pie and one or two glasses of cider.'"

Admitting this to be dieting, it is, at least, such a kind of dieting as
will not be likely, very soon, to cure dyspepsia. And yet to hundreds,
if not thousands, _dieting_ is little more than an increased attention
to what they eat--I mean, from meal to meal. Yet no changes of food,
even for the better, will compensate for this increased watchfulness
over--I might perhaps say devotion _to_--the stomach. The Philippians,
to whom Paul wrote so touchingly, are not the only people in the world
whose god is their abdominal region. Such an anxious attention to the
demands of an abnormal appetite, only tends to increase that
determination of blood to the stomach, to prevent which all judicious or
effective dieting is intended.

Dyspepsia only renders her devotees--her very slaves--the more enslaved.
With such, every attempt to cure the disease by dieting is still stomach
worship. They must have their very medicine taste agreeably and _sit_
well. At all events, they must and will have their minds continually
upon it, and must and will be continually inquiring whether they may
safely eat this article or that or the other.

It would be almost true to affirm that the fall of man from primeval
integrity, consists essentially in dyspepsia, and that every descendant
of Adam and Eve is a dyspeptic. The attention of mankind generally, is
directed too exclusively as well as too anxiously, to the inquiry, what
they shall eat, and what they shall drink. That we must eat, and drink
too, is quite obvious--nothing more so. That the Author of nature
intended, also, that we should take pleasure in our eating