Operation had been advised, insisted upon, as the only means of relief. But he feared operation, as he said he had seen too many of these among his friends, some of whom had failed to leave the hospital, and the more fortunate after a year or two were as bad as ever, so he refused operation and continued to suffer, though not in silence.

His gnawing hunger compelled frequent eating, but this was followed by an increase in pain and general misery, so he was between the devil and the deep sea continually.

This young man separated completely his incompatible foods, and reported afterward that the very first meal so eaten was fairly comfortable, and after a week he had forgotten all his troubles. The writer has had many a vote of personal thanks from this young man's office assistants for the relief which they experienced through the recovery of his good nature.

Had this supposed ulcer been located in the duodenum, eating would have quite fully relieved the pain, as in this case it is the presence of the acid chyme, as it filters down from the stomach through the opening pylorus, that is the cause of the intense pain, and when fresh food enters the stomach the pylorus closes. When this fresh food is also reduced to a chyme the pylorus allows it to enter the duodenum to injure again the ulcerated surface with the fresh load of acid.

The chief diagnostic point between these two conditions of gastric or duodenal ulcer is in this fact, but it is not at all infrequent that both areas are at one time open ulcers, when pain is present soon after the meal and in two or three hours takes on a different character, making pain all the time till the stomach is empty again, and then the gnawing that compels another meal and another aggravation.

Yet these conditions are so simple that it is a shame that so few know why they have such conditions or what to do about it.

Not every gastric or duodenal ulcer is from the use of incompatibles, some coming from a too high protein habit for too many years, getting up a too high habit of hydrochloric acid production to take care of this.

In such cases the professional reasoning says that as the one and only function of hydrochloric acid in the stomach is the first step in the digestion of concentrated protein, therefore, the way to get relief is to eat much protein, as this will give the acid an object of attack that will more completely neutralise its irritating effects. This works very well as long as one can go on eating more and more and more meat, but there is a limit to this, and when the limit is reached these cases usually find themselves with gastric or duodenal ulcer or worse. a cancer of one or the other region.

This is short reasoning, surely, for the thing comes in such cases from the use of too much meat, and will cease when hydrochloric acid is no more needed in digestion, as by a strictly protein-free diet. Nature soon abandons a useless function.

A few years ago a newspaper correspondent, a free lance, taking assignments from any syndicate that required his services, had just returned from France, where he had been sent on some special work during the war. He had suffered increasing distress for several years, but had finally reached a point where he could no longer write a connected or well-thought-out article, so knew he could take no more assignments, and was seriously considering suicide.

He had been to the best digestive specialists in this country, under one of the leaders in digestive troubles in New York for two years before going to France, and under this man he had been instructed to eat more and more meat, which did give him relief for several hours, the larger amount he ate securing relief the longer time, because it took longer for the stomach to prepare this large task for release to the duodenum, when his pain again set in, for the ulcer was duodenal, as test showed.

He had about reached the end of this state of affairs when he went to France, and while there he inquired for the very best specialist on such troubles, and nothing but the best would do for him.

This man took an opposite view of the case, reasoning that as such conditions come from too much hydrochloric acid therefore one should quit calling it out, take alkalies for relief and wait till the acid flood had subsided, as it would in a short time.

The dietary plan of this man was good, but still showed too much incompatible chemistry, but before relief could be expected the patient returned via London and there consulted the best he could find, who agreed with the New York man, and back he went to the meat and the pain.

It was at this stage that he presented himself for treatment, and was told very much what he had been told in Paris, so he was now firmly convinced that no one knew very much about such conditions and said so very plainly.

However, he consented to a ten days' trial of the different plan, at the end of which he returned with perfect peace inside his internal realm, and never again cultivated a high hydrochloric acid habit.

Again, all we can do to cure disease is to quit causing it.

This man knows now that he made his troubles every day, at every meal, and he is disgusted with the men who allowed him to suffer needlessly for years when all the time he was but a week away from real cure, if he had been properly instructed on diet. Can you blame him for feeling so?

Dr. Leonard Williams is right, and for these omissions in medical training someone should be hanged, but who?

This man's head cleared in three days so there was no more thought of suicide, and he was a better newspaperman at once than he had been for several years before.

These acid states do not come at once out of a clear sky, but are the culmination of a long upbuilding of acid, a lowering gradually of the alkalin reserve, and this culmination is merely the point beyond which function can no longer retain a semblance of the normal, the breaking point, when pathology shows first, a late stage, and yet there is no effort made up to this point to find out why one is less than well.

The expert diagnostician takes great credit to himself for early recognition of the pathology, but when this is well defined the patient has had his condition a very long time, and this is only the first outward expression in tangible form of a condition that was well developed perhaps years before.

It is even so in the study of cancer, for the whole cry is early diagnosis and radical removal, when cancer has been in the system a long time before there is any local evidence of this, always.

So early diagnosis is never early enough to escape organic disease, and should be considered criminally late diagnosis.

The time to do something, as said before, is when first one feels like less than kicking the ceiling when he arises in the morning, for then disease is on the way, and we should begin to consider getting back before something happens.

If we were to return again to the natural foods in their natural form, as primitive man would find them, there would be no thought of compatible or incompatible mixtures of foods.

We would probably take nothing at all till free from the fear of being caught by some wild beast, or overcome by some other primitive specimen of our own genus, and when at liberty to think, if we realized a desire for food, we would no doubt take the one thing most available at the time, and of this eat as much as we desired.

This would be primitive habit, no doubt, and correct in every respect.

The writer knows of a young couple who have solved all their digestive and culinary troubles very simply.

When hungry they determine what it is they want; then they prepare as much of this one thing as they desire, and fill up on this alone.

One thing of which they are both very fond is fried cabbage, cabbage shredded and stewed down in a hotel-size skillet or frying pan till all the water is evaporated, or nearly so, then butter is added and the whole stirred in the hot pan till it is slightly browned.

They eat the entire thing at one sitting, and claim they enjoy their new way of living very much more than the variegated style that is usual, and by changing the food from meal to meal they still get the necessary variety to prevent staleness of appetite.

Both had formerly suffered much at the hands of many physicians, but now all their former digestive difficulties are gone and they are strangers to doctors and medicines of all kinds.

This method of eating is not advised, though it is a very easy way to get back to something resembling normal in cultivating the instinct that will again take care of our nutritional needs by telling us what we want, and when we want it, and how much.

Man has lost this instinct through disuse, for his individual preferences at the time have little consideration, the nearest approach to this being usually a choice of two or three kinds of meat at any one meal, perhaps also of desserts.

It surely is much safer to make the meal of not over two or three articles than to include ten or more, as is usual on the table d'hote bill, for the simpler the selection the less liability to chemical chaos is the result.

If every one were to rigidly separate the incompatible foods as noted above, he would do more to arrest the continual and rising tide of acid than any one thing else could do, probably, at least this would be true of those who are not every day heavy meat eaters, for these will create a dangerous amount of acid even if the accompanying foods are not chemically incompatible with the meat.

Of all the mistakes made every day no doubt the commonest 13 this use of foods together in one meal that cannot possibly digest together, and it matters nothing that every one does this, for nearly every one is ill in some appreciable way or to some extent, to say nothing of the greatly lowered efficiency that does not pass as illness till some disease actually develops.

The easiest thing to do first in reforming the dietary habit is to separate all the carbohydrate forms of foods from both acids and proteins, and when this is done the reward for the slight effort expended will be sufficient to convince any doubter that there is something in diet after all, and may even tempt him to make further excursions into the study of foods as a means for keeping well.

The time and thought spent in this way will yield far greater returns than could be the case in any other line of study or thought or work, so it is to be strongly recommended to every one that he get busy and find out what food does to him and how.