The heart is the great central organ of circulation. The blood moves in a circle, returning to the heart and being pumped out again. The more food one consumes the greater is the work of the heart and other organs of the body. The less food consumed the less the heart must work. By reducing the amount of food consumed, or by fasting, the heart is given a rest. Heart-failure often follows a hearty meal.

Dr. Walter said: "Fifty years ago the term 'heart-failure' was unknown; bleeding and purging had been so constantly relieving the blood of its nutritive materials, and relieving the heart of its burdens that death seldom occurred from failure of the heart's action; today the term is a common one, due, as the reader will surely see, to the theory that food is nutrition, and, therefore, the blood must be loaded and the heart burdened with material which the tissues cannot appropriate. Stuffing and stimulating patients during the progress of acute diseases, even of those who are in good health, beyond their power to appropriate the food, is, we believe, the chief reason for the heart-failures of today."--Life's Great Law, pp. 204-5.

"After an organ has been lashed by overstimulation," says Dr. Tilden, until its nutrition is perverted and organic change has taken place, it may come back to normal if all stimulating influences are removed and sufficient rest--physical, mental and physiological--is given. If nutrition is very greatly impaired, and the organ is broken down to the extent of adding infection to toxemia, even a million-dollar remedy may not cure."--Philosophy of Health, p. 399, Nov. 1922. When over eating, sensual excesses, drug habits, emotional over-irritations, treatments and operations have lashed the organism into impotency; when the lash of stimulation has produced so much enervation that one is no longer able to control his nerves, his limbs are weak and wobbly, the mind dull, special senses failing and the sexual powers gone, all the doctors of the various schools of healing have to offer is more stimulation and more operations.

The organs of the body function as a unit, the stronger ones increasing their work to compensate for any failure in the weaker ones.

Each organ possesses the ability to do extra work so that compensations are constantly taking place in the body. The weaker organs are allowed to give down only when the stronger ones are no longer able to furnish adequate compensation. Enervation lowers functional efficiency in both the strong and the weak organs.

Those who resort to stimulating methods fail to take into consideration the fact that there is fatigue of the nervous system-- enervation. They stimulate the vital activities of their patients with little or no consideration for the after effects. Such treatment is like whipping a tired and overworked horse; makes him work harder but exhausts him sooner.

The more excellent way is to carefully husband the vital forces. The greater and more profound the impairment of a function, the more profound the "disease," and the more serious the danger connected with the part performing that function and with the parts performing collateral functions. Hence, the greater the need for conservation of nerve-energy.

Contrasting the "rest-cure" with the tonic practice so long in vogue, Dr. Robert Walter, says "The Rest Care is the only scientific cure known to our day." He further says: "The 'Rest-Cure' is not simply the proper cure for disease in its varied forms, but for all the ills that afflict humanity. Only power in abundant measure can produce vigorous health or enable one to do successful work; incompetence, disease, and especially chronic diseases, are due to depleted vital resources, which depletion is very apt to be increased, rather than diminished, by the methods in vogue of sustaining one's powers. 'He that would save his life shall lose it.' It is always a dire misfortune for any one to feel his want of power, and to commence to supplement or sustain it under present-day methods. The overworked, 'run-down,' well-nigh exhausted portion of the community is a large one, each individual being analogous to a locomotive, whose steam-pressure is greatly reduced. It is not steam that drives the steam-engine, but the intensity of the force in the steam. Exhausted vitality, like exhaust-steam, can do little work. And yet too many are trying to carry forward life's work upon partially exhausted vital resources, always trying to make up for deficiency of power by the use of stimulants and other forcing processes.

"The folly of all this is well illustrated by the folly of the engineer who would do his work with steam at fifty pounds pressure when he should have one hundred pounds. An engine with fifty pounds pressure can do some work, at sixty pounds it may do the work of forty horses, at eighty the work of fifty horses, while at one hundred pounds it is a sixty-horse-power engine. Just so the ability which one possesses for work is determined chiefly by the intensity of his powers. Half-dead men are altogether too common, waiting unconsciously for some disease-germ to gather them in. For the principles we are advocating show that contagious and epidemic diseases result from depleted powers of the patient more than from any other consideration. It is a remarkable fact that epidemics rarely increase the total death-rate of a community, if we extend our statistics over a sufficient length of time. A contagious disease is only a form of taking off. Highly vitalized men don't die, even if they should contract the disease, which they rarely do; it is the enfeebled, depleted, poisoned ones that succumb to infection. If they had not died of LaGrippe, smallpox, or other such ailment, they would surely have fallen a victim of pneumonia, typhoid, or the like.

"The question before us, therefore, is not simply how to regain or maintain health, and not alone how to preserve life, but how to live well, feel well, enjoy life, do efficient work, and be entirely free from the habits and indulgences which so frequently enslave men. To this end we recall that it is nature that cures, as she does everything else in the natural world; in this matter of cure we are called upon to deal with an important department of natural existence, known as the vital. This department, like each of the others, is presided over by its own inherent force, controlled in its operations by its own great law, which force under control of its law performs all the functions of its department and produces all its phenomena. Vitality, called also vital force, produces, repairs, heals; the rapidity and certainty of its work correspond chiefly to the amount of power; all processes should be employed to recuperate the patient's powers, and nothing done to deplete them. Though temporary relief may be secured by depletion, as by purging and blood-letting, because the power of the disease is the patient's vital power, so that reducing the one always reduces the other, all physicians of all schools now agree that such practice is destructive to the patient's best interests. No one now believes it to be wise practice to cure disease by destroying health, no matter how persistently he may ignorantly continue the method.