handling of a trained nurse. The agony was such that
the hypodermic needle was required to make existence endurable, and it
was used with the idea that the brain would be less injured by the
remedy than by the agony with its inevitable loss of sleep.

I know of no disease in which treatment has been more savage than in
this. The remedies in common use at that time were mainly new and of
supposed specific powers; but they were so violent, and proved to be so
futile, that they have all been given up since by the majority of the
profession.

As the days went on the disease declined in spite of the enforced
comfort through the needle; there were easier movements, a clearing of
the skin from sallow to a tint of redness, and finally, after a month,
the armchair could be used for a change.

On the morning of the forty-sixth day there was revealed in the face the
perfect color of health, and happiness marked every line of the
expression. There was ability to walk through several rooms of her home.
But it was not until the afternoon that the first food was desired and
taken, and never before was plain bread and butter, the supreme objects
of desire, so relished. In the following few months there was an actual
gain of forty pounds.

My next marked case is a wonderful illustration of the self-feeding
power of the brain to meet an emergency, and a revelation, also, of the
possible limitations of the starvation period. This was the case of a
frail, spare boy of four years, whose stomach was so disorganized by a
drink of solution of caustic potash that not even a swallow of water
could be retained. He died on the seventy-fifth day of his fast, with
the mind clear to the last hour, and with apparently nothing of the body
left but bones, ligaments, and a thin skin; and yet the brain had lost
neither weight nor functional clearness.

In another city a similar accident happened to a child of about the same
age, in whom it took three months for the brain to exhaust entirely the
available body-food.

I will now enter upon a study of the brain and its powers along these
lines, to be enlivened by illustrative evidence. What reason and
physiology had I with me that I should use methods in the sick-room
wherein the entire medical world was against me, and with severest
condemnation?

The head is the power-house of the human plant, with the brain the
dynamo as the source of every possible human energy. We think, love,
hate, admire, la