s the hope for better things that sustains our
lives; suicide never occurs until all hope has departed. Even our
medical journals are heavily padded with pages of new remedies whose use
involves the most amazing credulity. Perhaps it is well, in the absence
of a sound physiological hygiene, that the people who are sick and
afflicted shall be buoyed up by fresh, printed promises. Perhaps it is
also well for the physician to be able to go into the rooms of the sick
inspired from the advertising pages of his favorite medical journals.

Are they not new stars of hope to both physician and the people? Why
should we not hope when new remedies are multiplying in such infinite
excess over newly discovered diseases? _New diseases?_ What is there
essentially new that can be treated with remedies, in the coated
tongues, foul mouths, high temperature and pulse, pain, discomfort, and
acute aversion to food, that is to be found in the rooms of the sick?
Are there really specifics for these conditions?

The hygiene to be unfolded in these pages is so new, so revolutionary,
that its first impress has never failed to excite every form of
opposition known to language, and yet its practicality is so great that
it is rarely questioned by those who fairly test it. It has not been
found wanting in its physiology, nor has it failed to grow wherever it
has found lodgement.

The origin and development of this new way in health culture seem to
require something of professional autobiography, that it may be seen
that it is a matter of evolution and not of chance, not a fad that has
only its passing hour.

After receiving my medical degree from the University of Michigan, and
serving a term as house physician to the U. S. Marine Hospital at
Detroit, Michigan, I entered one of the large army hospitals at
Chattanooga, Tenn., at the beginning of the Sherman campaign in Georgia,
where I found a ward of eighty sick and wounded soldiers fresh from the
battle of Resacea. My professional fitness for duties so grave and so
large in extent was of a very questionable order, and I did not in the
least overestimate it.

It had not escaped my notice, even before I began the study of medicine,
that whether disease were coaxed with doses too small for mathematical
estimate, or whether blown out with solid shot or blown up with shells,
the percentage of recoveries seemed to be about the same regardless of
the form of treatment.

I was reared in a large fami