this case cleared my mind from
confusion as to the anomaly.

One of my medical friends with whom calomel was as a sheet-anchor often
asserted that babies would actually get fat on it. That bulk would
actually increase by use of the forceful medicine is likely; but that
the increase would be dropsical I think is unquestionable.

The dropsy of debility is due to a loss of tone of the vascular system;
the walls of the vessels become thinner and therefore dilate. In the
feet and limbs of the old and greatly enfeebled by disease the veins
become distended to abnormal size by the force of gravity, resulting in
effusion of water into the cellular tissues, which increases when in the
upright position during the day and decreases when in the horizontal
position at night.

A toning up of the entire vascular system, by which a reverse current
from the tissues into the bloodvessels is made possible, is the only
means for relief.

This flash-light upon the part physics plays in the cure of disease put
me upon the true lines of investigation, and furnished a key for the
solution of many problems. From this time on I was to be kept busy, not
in winning victories, but in studying them.

This new physiology was not fully apprehended until long after the
no-breakfast plan was taken up. It came to me link by link; but the
missing link was the fact that food only restores waste, that lost
strength is only restored by sleep; and it now seems to me that I was
very dull not to have found it out long before I did. It seems to me
that no method of health culture, none in the treatment of disease can
have any physiological basis where these facts are not taken into
account.

For a time I failed to look beyond the ailments of the stomach for
curative results, until really surprising news began to reach me from
many sources. There would come to me those who had to tell about clearer
vision, acuter hearing, a stronger sense of smelling, etc., senses that
were not thought to be affected by disease; or there would be news that
chronic, local ailings, as nasal or bronchial catarrhs, skin diseases,
hemorrhoids, or other intractable disease, in some mysterious manner,
were undergoing a decline under the new regime.

In the domain of drugs we have medicines that vivid imagination has
endowed with presumed affinities for locations that are diseased. They
enter the circulation and happily get off at the right spot, to act
curatively; but no theori