mach, with the
highest cheer or ecstacy to stimulate the highest functional activity,
or the shock of bad news to paralyze. From cheer to despair, from the
slightest sense of discomfort to the agony of lacerated nerves,
digestive power goes down. Affected thus, digestive power wanes or
increases, goes down or up, as mercury in a barometer from weather
conditions.

Digestive conditions in their maximum are revealed in the school-yard
during recess, when Nature seems busy recovering lost time.

How compares the ramble of a June morning, with the blue and sunshine
all above, the matchless green of the trees, and all the air fragrant
with the perfume of flowers and alive with music from the winged singer,
in digestive conditions, with those in the rooms of the sick, where
there is only distress felt in the body and seen in the faces of the
friends?

In time of health, if we eat when we are not hungry, or when very tired,
or in any mental worriment, we find that we suffer a loss of vital
power, of both physical and mental energy. How, then, can food be a
support to vital power when the brain is more gravely depressed by
disease? Yet from the morning of medical history the question of how
vital power is supported in time of sickness has never been considered,
because there has never been any doubt as to the support coming from
food. I assume this to be a fact, since all works on the practice of
medicine of to-day enjoin the need to feed the sick to sustain their
depressed energies--all this without a question as to whether there is
not a possibility of adding indigestion to disease when food is enforced
against Nature's fiat.

Since vital power is centred in the brain, do we need to feed, can we
feed, for other than brain reasons? This physiology admitted, there is
no other conclusion possible than that feeding the sick is a tax on
vital power when we need all that power to cure disease.

With all this physiology behind me, for more than a score of years I
have been going into the rooms of the sick to see the evolutions of
health from disease, as I see the evolutions from the dead wastes of
March to the affluence of June, and from the first I had the exceeding
advantage of being able to study the natural history of disease, a
history in which none of the symptoms were aggravated by digestive
disturbances.

As there was no wasting of vital power in the hopeless effort to save
the body from wasting, I had a clear right