mental rest. If you become excited, or nervous, or angry on a milk diet, you may turn all the contents of your stomach into hard curds, and may put yourself into convulsions. The wonderful thing about the milk diet is the state of physical and mental bliss it makes possible. It is the ideal way of breaking a fast, because it leaves you no chance to get hungry; you have all the food you want, and your system is bathed in happiness, a sense of peace and well-being which is truly marvelous and not to be described. You gain anywhere from half a pound to two pounds a day, and you feel that you have never before in your life known what perfect health could be. The fast sets you a new standard, you discover how nature meant you to enjoy life, and never again are you content with that kind of half existence with which you managed to worry along before you discovered this remedy.

But let me hasten to add that I do not recommend the fast as a regular habit of life. The fast is an emergency measure, to enable the body to cleanse itself and to cure disease. When you have got your body clean and free from disease, it is your business to keep it that way, and you should apply your reason to the problem of how to live so that you will not have to fast. If you find that you continue to have ailments, then you must be eating wrongly, or overworking, or committing some other offense against nature; either that, or else you must have some organic trouble-a bone in your spine out of place, as the osteopaths tell you, or your eyes out of focus, or your appendix twisted and infected. I do not claim that the fasting cure will supplant the surgeons and the oculists and the dentists. It will not mend your bones if you break them, and it will not repair your teeth that are already decayed; but it will help to keep your teeth from decaying in the future, and it will help you to prepare for a surgical operation, and to recover from it more quickly. I had to undergo an operation for rupture a couple of years ago, and I fasted for two days before the operation, and for three days after it, and I had no particle of nausea from the ether, and was able to tend to my mail the day after the operation.

There is one disease for which I hesitate to recommend the fast, and that is tuberculosis, because I have been told of cases in which the patient lost weight and did not recover

it. However, in my tabulation of 277 cases, you will note four cases of tuberculosis, and in my book is given a letter from a patient who claimed great benefit. If I had the misfortune to contract tuberculosis, I would take a three or four day fast, followed by a milk diet for a long period. The milk diet is pleasant to take, and it cannot possibly do any harm. If it did not effect a cure, I would try the Salisbury treatment—that is, lean meat ground up and medium cooked, and nothing else, except an abundance of hot water between meals. Prof. Irving Fisher wrote me that there is urgent need of experiment to determine proper diet in tuberculosis; and until these experiments have been made, we can only grope. I am quite sure that the "stuffing system," ordinarily used by doctors, is a tragic mistake.

In the case of any other disease whatever, even though I might take medical or surgical treatment, I would supplement this by a fast, because there is no kind of treatment which does not succeed better with the blood in good condition. In the case of emergencies, accidents, wounds, etc., I would rest assured that recovery would be more prompt if I were fasting. When David Graham Phillips was shot, I wrote a letter to the New York Call, saying that his doctors had killed him, because they had fed him while he was lying in a critical condition in the hospital. To take nutriment into the body under such circumstances is the greatest of blunders.

The fast will help children, just as it helps adults, only they do not need to fast so long. It will help the aged and make them feel young. (You need not be afraid to fast, no matter how old you are.) It is, of course, an immediate cure for fatness, and strange as it may seem, it is also a cure for unnatural thinness. People with ravenous appetites are just as apt to be thin as to be fat, because it is not what you eat that builds up your body, but only what you assimilate, and if you eat too much, you can make it impossible to assimilate anything properly. If you take a fast and break it carefully, your body will come to its normal weight, and all your functions to their normal activity.

A physician wrote me, taking me to task for listing among the cures reported in my tabulation a case of locomotor ataxia. This disease, he explained, is caused because a portion of a nerve has been entirely destroyed, and it is a disease that is

absolutely and positively and forever incurable. I answered that I knew this to be the teaching of present day medical science, but I invited him to consider for a moment what happens in nature. When a crab loses a claw, we do not take it as a matter of course that the crab must go about with one claw for the balance of its life; nature will make that crab another claw. Man has lost the power of replacing a lost leg, but he stills retains the power of replacing tissue which has been cut away by a surgeon's knife, and medical science takes this as a matter of course. How shall anybody say that nature has forever lost the power of rebuilding a bit of nervous tissue? How shall anyone say that if the blood-stream is cleansed of poisons, and the energy of the whole body restored, one of the results may not be the repairing of a broken nerve connection? I invite my readers who have ailments, and especially I invite all medical men among my readers, to make a fair test of the fasting cure. The results will surprise them, and they will quickly be forced to revise their methods of treating illness.

XXVII

DISEASES AND CURES

(Discusses some of the commoner human ailments, and what is known about their cause and cure.)

I begin with the commonest of all troubles, known as a "cold." This name implies that the cause of the trouble lies in exposure or chill. All the grandmothers of the world are agreed about this. They have a phrase or at least they had it when I was a boy: "You will catch your death." Every time I went out in the rain, every time I played with wet feet, or sat in a draft, or got under a cold shower, I would hear the formula, "You will catch your death."

And, on the other hand, there are the "health cranks," who declare vehemently that the name "cold" is a misnomer and a trap for people's thoughts. Cold has nothing to do with it, they say, and point to arctic explorers who frequently get frozen to death, but do not "catch cold" until they get back into the warm rooms of civilization. As for drafts, the "health cranks" aver that a draft is merely "fresh air moving"; which is supposed to settle the matter. However, when you come to think about it, you realize that a cyclone is likewise merely "fresh air moving," so you have not decided the question by a phrase.

While I was writing these chapters on health I contracted a severe cold-which was a joke on me. The history of this cold is as clear in my mind as anything human can be, and it will serve for an illustration, showing how much truth the grandmothers have on their side, and how much the "health cranks" have.

To begin with, I had been overworking. All sorts of appeals come to me; hundreds of people write me letters, and I cannot bear to leave them unanswered. I accepted calls to speak, and invitations where I had to eat a lot of stuff of which my reason disapproves; so one morning I woke up with a slight sore throat. I fasted all day, and by evening felt all right. But there came another call, and I consented to take a long automobile ride on a cold and rainy night, and

when I got back home, after five or six hours, I was thoroughly chilled, and my "cold" came on during the night.

This explanation will, I imagine, be satisfactory to all the grandmothers of the world. All the dear, good grandmothers know that an automobile ride on a cold, rainy night is enough to give any man "his death." But listen, grandmothers! I have lain out watching for deer all night in the late fall, with only a thin blanket to cover me, and gotten up so stiff with cold that I could hardly move; yet I did not "catch cold." When I was a youth, I have ridden a bicycle twenty miles to the beach in April, with snow on the ground, and plunged into the surf and swam, and then ridden home again. I have bathed in the sea when I had to run a quarter of a mile in a bathing suit along a frost-covered pier, and with an icy wind blowing through my bones; yet I never took cold from that, and never got anything but a feeling of exhilaration. So it must be that there is some reason why exposure causes colds at one time and not at another.

The explanation takes you over to the "health cranks." They understand that your blood-stream must be clogged, your bodily tone reduced by bad air and lack of exercise, and more especially by over-eating, or by an improperly balanced diet. But then most of them go to extremes, and insist that the automobile ride and the chilled condition of my body had nothing to do with my cold. But I know otherwise I have watched the thing happen so often. In times when I was run down, the slightest exposure would cause me a cold, literally in a few minutes. I have got myself a sore throat going out to the wood-pile on a winter day with nothing on my head. I have got a cold by sitting still with wet feet, or by sitting in a draft on a warm summer day, when I had been perspiring a little. How to explain this I am not sure, but my guess is that you drive the blood away from the surface of the body at a time when it is weakened and exposed to infection, and you drive away the army of the white corpuscles, and give the battlefield of your body to the germs.

I know there are nature curists who argue that germs have nothing to do with disease; but they have never been able to convince me germs are too real, and too many, and too easy to watch. If you leave a piece of meat exposed to the air in warm temperature, the germs in the air will settle