I had been trying experiments all this time. I had been going to one doctor after another, and had got to realize that the doctors only treated symptoms; they treated the "diseases" when they appeared--but nobody ever told you how to keep the "diseases" from appearing. Why could there not be a doctor who would look you over thoroughly, and tell you everything that was wrong with you, and how to set it right? A doctor who would tell you exactly how to live, so that you might keep well all the time! I was studying economics, and becoming suspicious of my fellow man; it occurred to me that possibly it might be embarrassing to a doctor, if he cured all his patients, and taught them how to live, so that none of them would ever have to come to him again. It occurred to me that possibly this might be the reason why "preventive medicine," constructive health work, was getting so little attention from the medical fraternity. Two things that plagued me were headache and constipation, and they were obviously related. For constipation, the world had one simple remedy; you "took something" every night or every morning, and thought no more about it. My stout and amiable grandmother had drunk a glass of Hunyadi water every morning for the last thirty or forty years, and that she finally died of "fatty degeneration of the heart" was not connected with this in the mind of anyone who knew her. As for the headaches, people would tell you this, that, and the other remedy, and I would try them--that is, unless they happened to be drugs. I was getting more and more shy of drugs. I had some blessed instinct which saved me from stimulants and narcotics. I had never used tea, coffee, alcohol or tobacco, and in my worst periods of suffering I never took to putting myself to sleep with chloral, or to stopping my headaches with phenacetin. At the end of six or eight years of purgatory, I came upon a prospectus of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. This seemed to me exactly what I wanted; this was constructive, it dealt with the body as a whole. So I spent a couple of months at the "San," and paid them something like a thousand dollars to tell me all they could about myself. The first thing they told me was that meat-eating was killing me. It was perfectly obvious, was it not, that meat is a horrible feeding place for germs, that rotten meat is dreadfully offensive, and likewise digested meat--consider the excreta of cats, for example! I listened solemnly while Doctor Kellogg read off the numbers of billions of bacteria per gram in the contents of the colon of a carnivorous person. It certainly seemed proper that the author of "The Jungle" should be a vegetarian, so I became one, and did my best to persuade myself that I enjoyed the taste of the patent meat-substitutes which are served in hundred calory portions in the big Sanitarium dining-room.