It is certain that in the last ten years, with the greatest mental strain on me, I should have gone down again, and perhaps more than once, if I had not found what caused "nerves" and how to prevent it. In the meantime I have written ten or more books, and every writer, at least, knows what a nerve-racking profession writing is. In addition to all this mental labor I have gone right ahead with my medical practice. Surely there is balm in this particular Gilead. But if you will not chew your food to a cream you need not expect to win the entire reward. And you must do this not only one day or one week or one month or one year, but all the days, weeks, months, and years that you may live. And, alas! I know only too well all the trouble well-meaning but deluded people who sit at the table with a nervous individual will make him when they discover how much time he is taking to chew his food. At first, because of the length of time I spent at a meal, such people thought I must be eating as much as a horse. But, here and there, for I was in many places, when people found out what I was doing, they would only courteously deride me for being so gullible about what they termed fads. We are all well aware that the vast majority of Americans do not chew their food to a cream or anything like it. And there are those, therefore, who advance as an argument that because the majority do not there must be something wrong with the minority who do. Well, let us follow this out a little: Not so many hundred years ago everybody believed the world was _flat_. But their theory did not make it flat. And so, even though thousands of people who crowd our eating houses do bolt their food, that does not prove there is no danger in the practice. And they who do it are digging their graves with their teeth. _Chew your food!_ III. RIGHT AND WRONG DIET FOR NERVOUS PEOPLE "He who leads a sober and regular life, and commits no excess in his diet, can suffer but little from disorders of any kind." --CORNARO People who are the offspring of nervous parents and who have had a nervous breakdown should not eat commercial sugar, eggs, or animal food of any kind whatever. These statements may seem wholly unimportant to some people, but I realize what a tremendous bomb I throw into the camps of others when they read them. You see, for centuries people have believed meat and eggs to be the best of all foods; so when I make a statement like the foregoing, the effect is not unlike that which followed Columbus' statement that no matter what people believed, the fact was that the earth was round, not flat. From the very beginning it has not made a single bit of difference as to what physicians or anybody else thought; facts count. And no matter what we may think or how long we have thought it, facts go right on being facts just the same.