, and the
wound was healed--a wound that was three inches long on the surface and
six inches deep. On the fifteenth day the lad was able to be dressed and
able to walk about his room, and with a freshness of color that was
never observed in him before. What law of body was violated in the
preliminary treatment intended to prepare Nature for the ordeal and to
enable her to rally from it?

This fresh tragedy in one human life has become known to me while I
write. A man, a giant, in his eighty-eighth year, lost his appetite, and
was put to death by the following means: A pint of whiskey and from one
to two quarts of milk daily to keep him nourished. Five months passed
without any change in the bill of fare--five months of delirium, of
imbecilic muttering before the last breath was drawn. These tragedies
are common the world over. Do I cry against them with too loud a voice?
Would that I had a voice of thunder!

I have given a few examples of the crucifixions of the sick and the
afflicted, whereof I have many, and they are the real history of cases
known, and are constantly occurring in every community.

The cure of disease and injury by fasting--the mode of Nature--made the
greatest impression in families in which there was intelligence enough
to comprehend it; but the victories of Nature were complicated by cases
in which death was inevitable. With a feeling that I must give the new
hygiene to the world in printed form, I did not enlarge in public over a
method that would be certain to be suggestive of starvation, where food
was supposed to be of the greatest importance.

My sick-room success failed to enable me to draw larger checks; but the
satisfaction of going into the rooms of the sick and not having to rack
my mind over what medicine to give, what food to be taken, was a great
compensation for the absence of a large bank account. Professional
attainments and abilities play only a small part in the mere business
side of the medical profession. An innocent public believes with intense
convictions in the efficacy of dosage; and with distorted vision, as the
famous knight of La Mancha, sees giants in professional healers who are
really only windmills, with whom personal contact in the sick-room is
only too often a danger measured by its closeness.

Think of the wasting of the body during sickness; of the brain system,
which is life itself, that does not waste: think of the cases of
recovery in which for weeks no fo