But the time came when I would eat a meal of raw food, and for hours afterwards my stomach would feel like a blown-up football. Then somebody gave me a book by Dr. Salisbury on the subject of the meat diet. Of all the horrible things in the world, a meat diet sounded to me the worst; I had been a vegetable enthusiast for three years, and thought of eating meat as you would think of cannibalism. But there has never been a time in my life when I would not hear something new, and give it a trial if it sounded well; so I read the books of Doctor Salisbury, which have long been out of print, and have been curiously neglected by the medical profession. Salisbury was a real pioneer, an experimenter. He wrote in the days before the germ theory, and so missed his guess regarding tuberculosis, but he perceived that most of the common diseases are caused by dietetic errors, and he set to work to prove it. He showed that hog cholera and army diarrhea are the same disease, and come from the same cause. He took a squad of men and fed them on army biscuit for two or three weeks, until they were nearly dead, and then he put them on a diet of lean beef and completely cured them in a few days. He did this same thing with one kind of food after another, and in each case he would bring his men as near to death as he dared, and then he would cure them. He showed that meat is the only food which contains all the elements of nutrition, the only food upon which a person can live for an unlimited period. As Salisbury said, "Beef is first, mutton is second, and the rest nowhere." It was his idea that tuberculosis of the lungs is caused by spores of fermenting starch clogging the minute blood vessels. He claimed that there is an early stage of tuberculosis, in which the spores are floating in the blood stream; he put large numbers of patients upon a diet of lean beef, ground and cooked, and he cured them of tuberculosis, and if one of them would break the diet and yield to a craving for starch or sugar, Salisbury claimed that he could find it out an hour or two later by examining a drop of their blood under the microscope. In his books he described vividly the effects of an excess of starch and sugar in the diet. He called it "making a yeast-pot of your stomach"; and you can imagine how that hit my stomach, full of half digested bananas and prunes!