Food supports life as much by its stimulus, as by affording nourishment to the body. Where an artificial stimulus acts upon the system the natural stimulus of food ceases to be necessary. Under the influence of this principle, I increased or diminished my food with the signs I discovered of the increase or diminution of the seeds of the disease in my body. Until the 15th of September I drank weak coffee, but after that time I drank nothing but milk, or milk and water, in the intervals of my meals. I was so satisfied of the efficacy of this mode of living, that I believed life might have been preserved, and a fever prevented, for many days, with a much greater accumulation of miasmata in my system, by means of a total abstinence from food. Poison is a relative term, and an excess in quantity, or a derangement in place, is necessary to its producing deleterious effects. The miasmata of the yellow fever produced sickness and death only from the excess of their quantity, or from their force being increased by the addition of those other stimuli which I have elsewhere called exciting causes. In addition to low diet, as a preventive of the disease, I obviated costiveness by taking occasionally a calomel pill, or by chewing rhubarb. I had read and taught, in my lectures, that fasting increases acuteness in the sense of touch. My low living had that effect, in a certain degree, upon my fingers. I had a quickness in my perception, of the state of the pulse in the yellow fever, that I had never experienced before in any other disease. My abstemious diet, assisted perhaps by the state of my feelings, had likewise an influence upon my mind. Its operations were performed with an ease and a celerity, which rendered my numerous and complicated duties much less burdensome than they would probably have been under other circumstances of diet, or a less agitated state of my passions. My perception of the lapse of time was new to me. It was uncommonly slow. The ordinary business and pursuits of men appeared to me in a light that was equally new. The hearse and the grave mingled themselves with every view I took of human affairs. Under these impressions I recollect being as much struck with observing a number of men, employed in digging the cellar of a large house, as I should have been, at any other time, in seeing preparations for building a palace upon a cake of ice. I recollect, further, being struck with surprise, about the 1st of October, in seeing a man busily employed in laying in wood for the approaching winter. I should as soon have thought of making provision for a dinner on the first day of the year 1800.