_Prevention._--A stitch in time will save nine diabetic patients. Typhoid, small-pox, diphtheria, yellow fever and a number of other diseases have been practically eliminated. Tuberculosis, otherwise known as the white plague, is rapidly being chained. Why not do the same with diabetes? We have seen that overeating is the common cause. Let us, therefore, teach the virtues of keeping lean and fit. Incidentally, such teaching may help to control other chronic diseases. There is reason to believe that heart trouble, high blood pressure, gallstone and cancer, occur in the obese with greater frequency than in the lean. Obesity is a mark of long continued functional overstrain of all the organs of the body. Overeating of carbohydrates and proteins is especially injurious to the pancreas. In Berlin, during the war when the food supplies of the populace were greatly reduced and sugar and meat in particular were scarce, the number of new patients with diabetes decreased immensely. In America, with growing luxury and rising sugar consumption, diabetes is increasing by leaps and bounds. The Jews, as a race, have much diabetes, not because they are Jews, but because so many of them are luxury lovers, overeaters, and fat Jews. Diabetes cannot be entirely eliminated by preventing overeating. As we have seen, thin people are not immune if the heredity tendency in them is strong; and they develop the severest form of diabetes at a relatively tender age, and yet it is possible that even the number of these may be reduced in time. A leading authority once published the family trees of a number of diabetic families and these family trees suggest that the tendency to diabetes becomes stronger with each succeeding generation. In the grandparents the disease was mild and came on late in life--not until they had overeaten, presumably, for many years and were fat. In the parents the disease was more severe and appeared earlier in life, the result, presumably, of less overeating. In the third generation, the disease occurred in the children with still less provocation from overeating. Perhaps we can save our grandchildren, therefore, by keeping ourselves fit, and thus stamp out the diabetes of childhood which is always severe and, therefore, the most dreaded. It is worth a trial.