At the end of this time, after renewed and more careful attention to the matter of dress and exercise, Mrs. Lewis found herself fully restored to health. The next five years, until the summer of 1860, were devoted almost entirely to platform work in “the Middle and Northern United States and Canada.... It was his custom to speak on six evenings in the week on the laws of health, laying special stress on his favorite axiom, adapted to suit himself, ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure.’ On Sunday evenings he presented in the churches, or, by preference, in a large hall, when such could be obtained, his favorite subject, ‘The Duty of Christian Women in the Temperance Work.’” In 1856 he made a short visit to Paris, chiefly to secure material suitable for demonstration in his popular lectures on physiology, although he also improved the opportunity to attend clinics at some of the city hospitals. Referring to this period he speaks of himself as “burdened with what I felt to be my life-work, that of urging upon the people their right to ‘a sound mind in a sound body,’ and the introduction of a new system of physical training into the schools of the country ...;” and how his thoughts were turned to gymnastics is told in these words: “During the eight years of lecturing, the spare hours were devoted to the invention of a new system of gymnastics. The old, or German gymnastics, the one so common throughout our country,[224] was obviously not adapted to the classes most needing artificial training. Athletic young men, who alone succeeded in the feats of that gymnasium, were already provided for. Boat clubs, ball clubs, and other sports[225] furnished them in considerable part with the means of muscular training. But old men, fat men, feeble men, young boys, and females of all ages—the classes most needing physical training,—were not drawn to the old-fashioned gymnasium. The few attempts that had been made to introduce these classes to that institution had uniformly and signally failed. The system itself was wrong.”