savoury, or nuts.
Boiled or baked pudding or stewed fruit with custard or blanc
mange.

_Tea_ (four o'clock).--Tea or cocoa, with or without a little
bread and butter and cake.

_Supper_ (7 o'clock).--Vegetable soup, milk pudding and a little
cheese, butter and salad and wholemeal bread.

I am forty-nine years of age, lead a fairly active life,
frequently taking walking exercise. I am very tall and weigh
twelve stone. Have had no serious illness, but been more or less
anaemic all my life.

If you can tell me whether there is anything wrong in connection
with my diet and suggest the cause of, and treatment for, the
boils I shall be exceedingly obliged.

In order to help this correspondent to permanently get rid of these
boils, we must first ascertain what those troublesome manifestations
are and look to the causes which produce them.

A boil is a small, tense, painful, inflammatory swelling appearing in
or upon the skin, and is due to the local death or gangrene of a small
portion of the skin's surface. This eventually comes away in the form
of a core, and, until this has cleared away, the boil will not heal or
cease to be painful.

Boils occur chiefly on the neck, arms or buttocks. If very large they
are known as carbuncles, and if they occur on the fingers or toes they
are described as whitlows. It is often the friction of a frayed-out
collar or cuff, of tight waist clothing, or, in the case of whitlows,
the introduction of some irritant or poison between the nail and the
skin that determines the precise site at which they will come.

Boils, although rarely dangerous to life, are usually accompanied by
pain severe out of all proportion to the extent of surface involved.
This gives rise to much broken rest and loss of vitality, which at
once ceases when the boil has finished its course. Boils usually occur
in series or crops.

Now large numbers of people wear collars and cuffs with frayed edges,
or handle irritants with their fingers, but they do not necessarily
contract boils or whitlows. Therefore, we see that there must be other
factors to be taken into consideration to account for their presence.
The orthodox germ-loving practitioner may tell you that a boil is a
purely local disorder and that a certain form of microbe, known as the
_Staphylococcus pyogenes_, is the cause of it. This germ, he asserts,
lives normally on the surface of the skin and, when