“You have indigestion,” he said, when I had told him my troubles. “I will give you some medicine.” So every day after meals I took a teaspoonful of some red liquor which magically relieved the distressing symptoms incidental to doing hard brain-work after eating. But only for a year or two more, for then I found that the artificially digested food was not being eliminated from my system as regularly as necessary, and I had to visit the doctor again. He gave my ailment another name, and gave me another kind of medicine; and I went on, working harder than ever—being just then at an important crisis in my life. Gradually, however, to my great annoyance, I was forced to realize that I was losing that fine robustness which enabled me to say that I had not had a day’s sickness in fourteen years. I found that I caught cold very easily—though I always attributed it to some unwonted draught or exposure. I found that I was in for tonsilitis once or twice every winter. And now and then, after some particularly exhausting labor, I would find it hard to get to sleep. Also I had to visit the dentist more frequently, and I noticed, to my great perplexity, that my hair was falling out. So I went on, until at last I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and had to drop everything and go away and try to rest. That was my situation when I stumbled upon an article in the _Contemporary Review_, telling about the experiments of a gentleman named Horace Fletcher. Mr. Fletcher’s idea was, in brief, that by thorough and careful chewing of the food, one extracted from it the maximum of nutriment, and could get along upon a much smaller quantity, thus saving a great strain upon the bodily processes. This article came to me as one of the great discoveries of my life. Here was a man who was doing for himself exactly what I had asked my physician to do for me so many years previously; who was working, not to cure disease, but to live so that disease would be powerless to attack him. I went at the new problem in a fine glow of enthusiasm, but blindly, and without guidance. I lived upon a few handfuls of rice and fruit—with the result that I lost fourteen pounds in as many days. At the same time I met a young writer, Michael Williams, and passed the Fletcher books on to him—and with precisely the same results. He, like myself, came near killing himself with the new weapon of health.