symptoms that had behind it an unknown primary cause, I utterly ignored all specific medication and kept my patients comfortable, by the relieving dose as indicated by agony.

I can have no doubt that feeding is a disease-prolonging agency, hence, if a fact, then my cases all must have been shortened by as much as this tax was avoided.

Rheumatism, I believed, was due to disordered digestion, or arising from eating for an unknown period beyond the power to digest and assimilate, hence a disease, determined in character by constitutional tendency, hence the need to obey when Nature called a halt, in causation, until repairs could be made. And why follow the old ways of treatment? Have they shortened by an hour the days and nights of agony during all the history of treatments?

Then do you not see there was the possibility of the germ origin and the germ cure, and, pending this, why not trust Nature to do something of the curing herself, even as we trust her in the fracture and the amputation?

One thing is absolutely beyond any question, that from the time when the loss of tissues disappeared by the cessation of disease, and therefore the return of that appetite that called aloud for the food which is best worth the digestive process, from that time until the absorbed tissues were duly replaced by those as fresh, as instinct with life as if just formed and fashioned by a divine hand; the time was not only shorter than the average, but living itself became a luxury of life, an existence of child-like happiness and indifference to all the strain of human affairs, in every case.

I had one opportunity to study this disease in a com

parative way. I was called to attend a case in a young woman suffering a third attack-one in childhood, next in mature age, and this the severest in onset of all. In the previous attack, which lasted two months, milk was freely given, day after day, during all the long weeks.

In this third attack a debate was needed in which clear definition and unanswerable force of statement and reasoning was necessary, as to whether my patient's stomach should or should not be converted into a factory for the making of cheese curds, not marketable, for unless milk be given, how was life to be maintained for another 6 days? I won the victory for Nature, and then for a number of days, when there would have been agony far beyond what was experienced before, but for the dosage that made even the sick-bed comfortable, Nature went on with her work, there being no extra tax of vital power in the region of the stomach. And what the outcome? In less than a month the dosing was easily suspended, and soon there came, even before the end of the fourth week, an appetite for such food as rejoices the mouth of the woodchopper, and the doctor bowed himself out.

During the five or six years since, there has been no hint of a recurrence of the disease, for there has been a closer walk with those laws of life whose infringement made the disease possible.

During the past 17 years many cases of rheumatic fever have been treated on this plan of non-alimentation, and with the most satisfactory results, having found that, by not taxing vital power with food, and by the avoidance of those special remedies for the disease that play havoc with the stomach, not only has there been a shortening of the symptom stage of the disease, but by a good deal the convalescing stage.

And in these later years by teaching a higher science in prevention, through an unfolding of the physiological mode in cure, recurrences of disease, no matter what the form or character, have been rare to what they were formerly. The sick-bed ought always to be a text for a dissertation on cause, as well as cure, and thereby of avoidable recurrence.

LECTURE IX.

SPECIAL CASES OF FEVER CONSIDERED-DIPHTHERIA-A CASE IN THE AUTHOR'S FAMILY.

My Friends the Readers :

As the months and the years rolled on, and case after case of severe sickness passed through to a more successful issue, than I had ever experienced before, so did my faith and wonder at Nature's power in disease enlarge; and so did my love increase for the practice of natural science in disease, because I could but believe I was vastly more helpful to Nature than before; and so did it become more and more clearly evident that, for some unfathomable reason, Nature had no need of my artificial attempts to support her vital machinery when a contest with disease is going on; and so did it become more and more clearly evident that, as symptoms declined, so did power increase all along the line, even in some cases, for weeks, unaided by the digestion of food; and so, anomalous though it appeared, it began to be very evident that a new fact in medical, no, natural, physiological science had dawned upon me.

And how could this be? I utterly failed to satisfy myself; indeed, the mystery only seemed to deepen as it became more evident as a fact in science, and it was not until my eyes first glanced at the table I have told you so much about, that an explanation was possible, and that made it clear as an object in sunlight, at least in my mind.

And now, after a study over the question for years, including a study of all my fatal cases, it is my strong conviction that death is always due to the paralyzing effect of disease or injury on vital power, in a sense that opium, chloral, etc., paralyzes, and not because the brain is starved; in other words vital power becomes so overpowered that the brain becomes disabled from withdrawing its supplies from the several tissues by some unknowable process of cell destruction or paralysis.

And this reminds me that I must speak of my fatalities, for success of a method in practice is always gauged, you know, by the mortality diminished. Nothing succeeds like success."

During the past seventeen years my fatal cases have been mainly confined to infancy and childhood, to such diseases as diphtheria, convulsions, croupal bronchitis, etc., with illnesses generally short, and to such diseases as consumption, cancer, etc., in mature life, and from old age. Now, when a case of sickness falls into my hands and the patient dies before the skeleton condition is reached, it will not be from starvation; and when, after all taxing of vital power through the alimentary canal has ceased, and I add no more to it, and the patient is kept under the best conditions of care, with pain duly kept within bounds, then, if Nature fails to cure the disease, just as she does the wound or the fracture, it will be because death was inevitable through hereditary or constitutional conditions, and acquired conditions, avoidable or otherwise, and never because I have failed through lack of enforced feeding, or through failure to bombard the symptoms.

In my acute fatal cases, there was so general an inability to feed, even if it were desired, that I cannot