visits to the sick became of unsurpassed
interest, I watched every possible change as an unfolding of new life,
seeing the physical changes only as I would see the swelling buds evolve
into the leaves or flowers, reading the soul- and mind-changes in the
more radiant lines of expression.

I saw all these things with the naked eye, and more and more marvelled
at the bulk of our materia medicas, the size of our drug-stores, and the
space given to healing powers in all public and medical prints.

For years I saw my patients grow into the strength of health without the
slightest clue to the mystery, until I chanced to open a new edition of
Yeo's _Physiology_ at the page where I found this table of the estimated
losses that occur in death after starvation:

Fat 97 per cent.
Muscle 30 "
Liver 56 "
Spleen 63 "
Blood 17 "
Nerve-centres 0

And light came as if the sun had suddenly appeared in the zenith at
midnight. Instantly I saw in human bodies a vast reserve of predigested
food, with the brain in possession of power so to absorb as to maintain
structural integrity in the absence of food or power to digest it. This
eliminated the brain entirely as an organ that needs to be fed or that
can be fed from light-diet kitchens in times of acute sickness. Only in
this self-feeding power of the brain is found the explanation of its
functional clearness where bodies have become skeletons.

I could now go into the rooms of the sick with a formula that explained
all the mysteries of the maintenance and support of vital power and cure
of disease, and that was of practical avail. I now knew that there could
be no death from starvation until the body was reduced to the skeleton
condition; that therefore for structural integrity, for functional
clearness, the brain has no need of food when disease has abolished the
desire for it. Is there any other way to explain the power to make wills
with whispering lips in the very hour of death, even in the last moments
of life, that the law recognizes as valid?

I could now know that to die of starvation is a matter not of days, but
of weeks and months; certainly a period far beyond the average time of
recovery from acute disease.

III.

There fell to my care a very much worn-out mother, who took to her bed
with an attack of inflammatory rheumatism, with the joints so involved
as to require the