These chapters are not intended to be read as what my friend of the pamphlet calls them--an onslaught on the medical men engaged in lunacy practice. They are an onslaught on a crying national sin, and all who favour it. Among the men in lunacy practice are men who abhor the system on which any man may be writ down mad. Among them I have myself found one of the best friends I have had. He was one of old standing. He saw me when I was nearly at my worst; but he did not shut me up. He took me to his own house, and poured in oil and wine, like the good Samaritan he is. After a few days' entertainment with his own family, and at his own table--and he would never have of me one penny for his infinite pains--he assured me, and my friends too, that I was only a hypochondriac bound to get well. He would have made me so, if I would have consented to stay with him, in spite of a certain faith in hydrate of chloral, which I wish he would abandon. 'Hell in crystals,' my defining friend has called it. (Perhaps I may add here that the relation who should know me best testified to my sanity with as little variation.) I well remember how this warm-hearted doctor carried me off under his own protest to see an eminent dietist whom I would consult, so completely had the occult qualities of eggs and cold mutton been worried into me, and almost shouted as he left the room, in answer to the stereotyped, 'I hope you are very particular about his diet,' 'Diet be strong-worded; why, the man is dying of inanition!' So I was. But I was restlessly bent on my own ruin, it would seem; and 'Tu l'as voulu, Georges Dandin!' was the burden of my earliest asylum-dreams. The rolling stone would only stop in the breakers at the bottom of the cliff; and I found no Sisyphus to roll it up again till I played both stone and Sisyphus myself. Why, however, I was thus hastily shut up without any reference to so skilled a friend, and without my seeing him, I do not know. It was of him that I was thinking when I suggested what I believe to be one of the most important and easiest of necessary reforms--that no man should be 'certificated' without the assent of at least one valuable authority who knows him well, after careful personal examination.