There also I met Horace Fletcher, and learned to chew every particle of food thirty-two times, and often more. I exercised in the Sanitarium gymnasium, and watched the sterilized dancing--the men with the men and the women with the women. I was patiently polite with the Seventh Day Adventist religion, and laid in a supply of postage stamps on Friday evening. Finally, and most important of all, I went once a day to the "treatment rooms," and had my abdomen doctored alternately with hot cloths and ice. By this means I kept up a flow of blood in the intestinal tract, and stimulated these organs to activity; so my constipation was relieved, and my headaches were less severe--so long as I stayed at the Sanitarium, and was boiled and frozen once every day. But when I left the Sanitarium, and abandoned the treatments, the troubles began to return. Meantime, however, I had written a book in praise of vegetarianism--a book which has got into the libraries, and cannot be got out again! I went on to a new variety of health crank, the real "nature cure" practitioners. Vegetarianism was not enough, they insisted; the evil had begun long before, when man first ruined his food and destroyed its nutritive value by means of fire. There was only one certain road to health, and that was by the raw food route, the monkey and squirrel diet. I had gone out to California for a winter's rest, and decided I would give this plan a thorough trial. For five months I lived by myself, and the only cooked food I ate was shredded wheat biscuit. For the rest I lived on nuts and salads and fresh and dried fruits; and during this period I enjoyed such health as I had never known in my life before. I had literally not a single ailment. I was not merely well, but bubbling over with health. I had a friend who said it cheered him up just to see me walk down the street. I thought that it was entirely the raw food, and that I had solved the problem forever; but I overlooked the fact that during those five months I had done no hard brain work, no writing. I went back to writing again, and things began to go wrong; my wonderful raw foods took to making trouble in my stomach--and I assure you that until you try, you have no idea the amount of trouble that can be made in your stomach by a load of bananas and soaked prunes which has gone wrong! For a year or two I agonized; I could not give up my wonderful raw food diet, because I had always before me the vision of those months in California, and could not understand why it was not that way again.