Some years later than this, Miss Adams was still living very simply. "My food," she says, "is raised bread, and butter, apple or pumpkin pie, and fruit in small quantity. I do not require more than a third as much food as most females. In fact, I can eat but little of any thing. My food, even now, distresses me very much, unless I vomit it. I eat no animal food, and roots of every kind distress me. I drink tea; I cannot drink water; it seems, in swallowing it, more like a solid than a liquid." There would be no difficulty in adding largely to the list of cases of dyspepsia which have been cured on the starvation plan; but these must suffice for the present chapter. FOOTNOTES: [K] For obvious reasons, I give real names and dates in this chapter. [L] Even Mr. Graham himself, whom he accidentally met, repeated to him the same caution! [M] Or other fruits equal to them. The reader must not forget that she had already subsisted five years without animal food, and that what she took of vegetable food was a very small quantity--little more than was taken by Mr. Robinson. CHAPTER XCI. DIETING ON MINCE PIE. A recent letter from a patient of mine, contains the following statement: "I met, yesterday, with a poor dyspeptic. He said he felt very bad indeed, and that he had been _dieting_ for a long time. I asked him what his diet had been. He said 'Bread and butter, for the morning meal; beef, etc., for dinner; and nothing at all, for supper, but a piece of mince pie and one or two glasses of cider.'" Admitting this to be dieting, it is, at least, such a kind of dieting as will not be likely, very soon, to cure dyspepsia. And yet to hundreds, if not thousands, _dieting_ is little more than an increased attention to what they eat--I mean, from meal to meal. Yet no changes of food, even for the better, will compensate for this increased watchfulness over--I might perhaps say devotion _to_--the stomach. The Philippians, to whom Paul wrote so touchingly, are not the only people in the world whose god is their abdominal region. Such an anxious attention to the demands of an abnormal appetite, only tends to increase that determination of blood to the stomach, to prevent which all judicious or effective dieting is intended. Dyspepsia only renders her devotees--her very slaves--the more enslaved. With such, every attempt to cure the disease by dieting is still stomach worship. They must have their very medicine taste agreeably and _sit_ well. At all events, they must and will have their minds continually upon it, and must and will be continually inquiring whether they may safely eat this article or that or the other.