while, and with much less fatigue than when there was a midnight
meal from a lunch-pail. Within a year the weight has gone down to one
hundred and eighty-eight pounds. To my professional eye there is beauty
in the bright eyes, in the condensed, smooth face, in the body enfolded
with clothes that flap in the breeze like the sails of a ship. No
accident will happen to precious human freight through his brain kept
free from digestive torpor while on duty.

Ever since my book has been out I have been in more or less trouble with
cases that badly needed my personal care, and not few in which death was
inevitable. For instance, there is a woman in Illinois who has been
ailing for years, and in spite of the No-breakfast Plan has had to take
to her bed with acute aversion to food. Medical art had utterly failed
before she changed her dietary methods.

Her dietary views are known, and so she is held in severe censure
because the sick stomach is not compelled to a futile service; and
though I am informed of an enlargement in the region of the bowels that
has been perceptible and tender for years, her death will be considered
suicidal from _starvation_.

A Warrensburg, Ill., editor began his fast by throwing up his food and
continued it to the end; yet because he had talked about a fast it was
supposed to be a case of suicide of the stupid kind; and though the
post-mortem revealed a diseased gall-bladder, the doctors who made it
did nothing to lessen the suicidal impression, and the death from
"starvation" appeared under large headlines in the public prints.

When men as learned, able, and eminent as Dr. Shrady, of New York, go
into print to inform the public that people may starve to death in ten
days, and when such men as Prof. Wood, of the University of
Pennsylvania, do not see any starvation in the wasting pounds of acute
disease, the care of acute sickness as Nature would have it is a grave
matter for the physician.

In five fatal cases under my care in which there was no possibility of
feeding, there was such agitation over the question of starvation as
would have subjected me to violence had my city been nearer the equator.
In all these cases I was compelled to have a post-mortem to silence
heathen raging. In one case in which a young man had died after weeks of
inability to take food, even one of my medical brethren carried the
conviction with him for years, and without seeking to inform himself,
that there was a deat