Avoid substances that would inflame the tissues or cause congestion of any organ of the body. If the tongue be coated avoid sugar, starchy foods and fresh milk. CHAPTER XXXI. COSTIVENESS, DIET, ETC. Take anything in the way of food which the unconsciously starved person can eat without the stomach and intestines protesting too much; any of the foods recommended for constipation, indigestion, diarrhea; and take yet more food if by so doing there is a gain in flesh, after exercising much patience as to time. Irrigate the system by imbibing freely of hot and cold water at various periods of the day. Good red wine mixed with the water drunk at meal-time may serve a good purpose in helping to enrich the blood. Keep the pores of the skin open by bathing; and all the functions of the body active by exercise, massage, pure air, sunlight, rest, sleep and seasonable clothing. The large intestines should be kept clean by proper amounts of water injected into them. The local cause of all the trouble should be treated by a competent physician. And with all the efforts, continue the treatment long enough to accomplish some good and then a much longer time to get well. Do not give up treatment under which you have improved if it requires one, two or three years to accomplish what you have so well started out to do. CHAPTER XXXII. DIET FOR DIARRHEA. A period marked by constipation, biliousness or poisons generated within or taken into the intestinal canal is often followed by diarrhea. Mental excitement will induce it in some persons. More often man's early and most common malady, proctitis, is the direct or indirect cause. Some forms of ulceration of the lower bowel induce diarrhea. Chronic cases of diarrhea usually follow the decline of vitality marked by the symptom of Costiveness, which means the interruption of all the functions of nutrition. The intestinal canal is then like a rubber tube with the contents hurried through it. The whole system is irritable as the result of an accumulation of secondary symptoms expressed by the word auto-intoxication. The food should be nutritious and non-irritating to the intestinal canal. Reliance must be placed, in severe cases, on liquid foods and beverages. The more solid foods may be taken in limited quantity as the recovery progresses. In more acute cases it is well to stop all food for twelve or twenty-four hours. You may take: _Liquid Food and Beverages_: Drink, if possible, pure spring water. If this cannot be obtained, sterilize the water, or distil and aërate it; it must be pure and soft. Better still: drink toast- or rice-water; kefyr, four days old; koumiss; lactic-acid water; zoolak; egg lemonade; sterilized milk with one third lime-water; whortleberry wine; acorn cocoa; unfermented grape-juice. _Soup_: chicken; mutton; clam; oyster broth; Doxsee's clam-juice; bouillon; Milkine; Horlick's and Mellin's food.