Three or four years ago I began to notice a continual irritating pain in my right side, which I quickly realized must lie in the appendix. I tried massage, and hot and cold water treatments, and my favorite remedy, a week's fast. The pain disappeared, but it returned, so finally I decided, to the dismay of my physical culture friends, to have the appendix out. For years I had been reading the statements of nature curists, that the appendix is an important and vital part of the body, which pours an oil or something into the intestinal tract, and so helps to prevent constipation. Well, evidently my appendix wasn't doing its job, so I took it to a good surgeon. What I found was that it had been twisted and malformed from birth, so that it was a center of continuous infection. From the time I had that operation, I have never had to think about the subject of constipation. This experience suggests to me how easy it is for people to make statements about health which have no relationship to facts. I do not recommend promiscuous surgery, and I perfectly well realize that if human beings would take proper care of their health, the great proportion of surgical operations would be unnecessary. I realize, also, that surgeons get paid by the job, and therefore have a money interest in operating, and it is perfectly futile to expect that none of them will ever be influenced by the profit motive. Nevertheless, it is true that sometimes surgical operations are necessary, and that by standing a little temporary inconvenience you can save yourself a life-time of discomfort. Take, for example, rupture. The human body has here a natural weakness, from which there results a dangerous and uncomfortable affliction. Hundreds of thousands of men are going around all their lives wearing elaborate and expensive trusses which are almost, if not entirely useless, and trying advertised "cures" which are entirely fakes. An operation takes an hour or two, and two or three weeks in bed, and when our government drafted its young men into the army and found that fourteen in every thousand of them had rupture, it shipped them into the hospitals wholesale and sewed them up. It happens that rupture affords one case where scar tissue is stronger than natural tissue, and there were practically no returns from the great number of army cases.