I do not know how many thousands of diseases medical science has now classified. And for each separate disease there are complex formulas, and your system is pumped full of various mineral and vegetable substances which have been found to affect it in certain ways. Perhaps you have a fever; then we give you a substance which reduces the temperature of your blood-stream. It never occurs to us to reflect that maybe nature has some purpose of her own in raising the temperature of the blood; that this might be, so to speak, the heat of conflict, a struggle she is waging to drive out invading germs; and that possibly it would be better for the temperature to stay up until the battle is over. Or maybe the heart is failing; then our medical man is so eager to get something into the system that he cannot wait for the slow process of the mouth and the stomach, he shoots some strychnine directly into the blood-stream. It does not occur to him to reflect that maybe the heart is slowing up because it is overloaded with fatigue poisons, of which it cannot rid itself, and that the effect of stimulating it into fresh activity will be to leave it more dangerously poisoned than before. We are dealing here with processes which our ancient mother nature has been carrying on for a long time, and which she very thoroughly understands. We ought, therefore, to be sure that we know what is the final effect of our actions; more especially we ought to be sure that we understand the cause of the evil, so that we may remove it, and not simply waste our time treating symptoms, putting plasters on a cancer. This is the fundamental problem of health; and in order to make clear what I mean, I am going to begin by telling a personal experience, a test which I made of medical science some twelve or fourteen years ago, in connection with one of the simplest and most external of the body's problems--the hair. First I will tell you what medical science was able to do for my hair, and second what I myself was able to do, when I put my own wits to work on the problem. I had been overworking, and was in a badly run down condition. I was having headaches, insomnia, ulcerated teeth, many symptoms of a general breakdown; among these I noticed that my hair was coming out. I decided that it was foolish to become bald before I was thirty, and that I would take a little time off, and spend a little money and have my hair attended to. I did not know where to go, but I wanted the best authority available, so I wrote to the superintendent of the largest hospital in New York, asking him for the name of a reliable specialist in diseases of the scalp. The superintendent replied by referring me to a certain physician, who was the hospital's "consulting dermatologist," and I went to see this physician, whose home and office were just off Fifth Avenue.