The following statements of the experience of Dr. Hubert Higgins and Dr. Ernest Van Someren are of particular value from the fact that, as physicians, they have been able to make unusually exact and scientific observations upon themselves and therefore to arrive at particularly valuable conclusions.

"The best period of health that I can remember in my life," writes Dr. Higgins, "was that between seventeen and twenty-one, during the time I was preparing for the medical profession. I had a small breakfast at about 7.30 A. M. and then went up to London to St. George's Hospital, which was about fourteen miles from my home. My parents gave me 2s. 6d. for my midday meal, but I fortunately economized and only spent 6d. to 10d. of it on food. After finishing my work I usually arrived home at 5.30 and had a 'meat tea'; this allowed me to devote six hours to reading. During the whole of this period I was in excellent mental and physical condition. I was made house surgeon at twenty-one, obtained my degree in under four years, besides obtaining several valuable prizes.

"After this I lived in the hospital, where three meat meals were provided. These I conscientiously ate 'to keep up my strength' during the performance of my exhausting duties. I consider that this period was the commencement of my degeneration. I put on twenty-four pounds in weight and lost much of my mental energy.

"My strong hereditary tendency to gout, with the excessive meat eating, the hurried eating, during some three and one-half years at St. George's Hospital, London, and at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, resulted in constant suffering from headache, lumbago, rheumatic pains, and all those distressing symptoms known under the generic name of 'goutiness.' After seven or eight years I weighed two hundred and twenty-four pounds and complained of increasing symptoms of gout. I then became a patient of Dr. Hof London, whose system requires one to abstain from meat, fish, poultry, beans, tea, coffee, in other words, from foods containing uric acid or its equivalent. For about five years, till the end of 1901, when I first met you, I fluctuated considerably in health, on the whole I am bound to say, in a steadily downward direction, till I was overloaded with the excessive weight of two hundred and eighty-two pounds.

"I commenced, under your advice, masticating my food thoroughly at the end of December, 1901. After practising this method till the present September, 1903, I have lost one hundred and four pounds in weight and consider that I have gained very considera-bly in mental and physical fitness. I prefer to divide this period into two parts: (a) The first eight months. During this time I followed my appetite, but with a strong mental bias in favour of keeping up as nearly as possible to the daily * physiological ration' of nitrogenous food. I lost, notwithstanding, some sixty-four pounds in weight in spite of having an inordinate appetite for butter, and generally taking two pints of milk daily. During this period I undertook some very severe work in the Laboratory of Physiological Chemistry, with the object of trying to devise some method of measuring the extent of a person's departure from their optimum health. This led almost unconsciously to a stronger mental bias in favour of prescribing the amount of food one should eat, and to a certain number of experiments in feeding. Towards the end of this period I got rather exhausted in consequence of my severe work and complained of occasional headaches.

Following the suggestions of some friends, I added fifty grams of casein to my daily diet for two or three weeks. This was followed by a return of rheumatism and considerable sickness and inability to work, (b) The subsequent six months. I resolved to devote this period to a careful study of my desires for food - to take no notes - to make no experiments - in short, to allow my body to run itself, and to try to make my brain interpret the wants of the body. I had moved for the purpose of this experiment into a small house, with a boy and a woman, who came daily to clean the house (I mention these details because practically one finds that a woman has usually such quick sympathy about matters concerning food that their agitation and fears are enough in themselves to cause you to modify your diet.) I only kept bread, butter, and milk in the house, all other foods I was obliged to send for, and if I required a dish to be cooked, I first learned how to do it myself and then taught the boy. I had no fixed times for meals, and did not have a table, laid, my food always being brought up on a tray; usually I did not interrupt the work I was doing.

I deliberately adopted all these precautions because I had become aware by experience of the extraordinary influence suggestion, and other mind influences, such as habit, had in one's selection of food and the amount one ate. During the first two months in conscientiously eating what I wished, as much of it as I wanted and when my appetite demanded food, my desires were very irregular, ranging over meats and fish (occasionally), chocolate, sweets, cream, cheese, butter, milk, bread, potatoes, oranges, bananas, sugar, etc., but during the final period my desires were much more simple and regular, confining themselves to bread, Gruyère cheese, butter, cream, bananas, occasionally milk. During and subsequent to this period I have become convinced that provided you eat your food slowly and follow your appetite, without guidance from any other knowledge whatever, you get marked preference for simple foods with increasing health and happiness, the contentment that comes from the inestimably valuable possession of simple desires." 26

"Three years ago, when I first met you," writes Dr. Van Someren to Mr. Fletcher, "though under thirty years of age, and myself a practising physician and surgeon, I was suffering from gout, and had been under the regime of a London specialist for the treatment of that malady. Though vigorously adhering to the prescribed diet, I suffered from time to time. My symptoms were typical - paroxysmal pain in my right great toe and in the last joints of both little fingers, the right one being tumefied with the well-known 'node.' From time to time, generally once a month, I suffered from incapacitating headaches. Frequent colds, boils on the neck and face, chronic eczema of the toes, and frequent acid dyspepsia were other and painful signs that the life I was leading was not a healthy one. Yet I was accounted a healthy person by my friends, and was, withal, athletic. I fenced an hour daily, took calisthenic exercises every morning, forcing myself to do them, and I rowed when I obtained leisure to do so. In spite of this exercise and an inherent love of fresh air, which kept all the windows of my house open throughout the year, I suffered as above.

Worse still, I was losing interest in life and in my work. . . .

26 Fletcher: "New Glutton or Epicure," pp. 226-235.