At this time it seems that, although he had reduced his food to the smallest possible amount, he had not altogether relinquished flesh-meat. He repaired to Bath for the waters and, by living in the most temperate way and by constant and regular exercise, he seemed to have regained his early health. At Bath he devoted himself to cases of nervous diseases which most nearly concerned his own state, and which were most abundant at that fashionable resort. About the year 1712, or in the forty-second year of his age, his health was fairly re-established, and he began to relax in the milk and vegetable regimen which he had previously adopted. His next publication was _An Essay on the Gout and Bath Waters_ (1720), which passed through seven editions in six years. In it he commends the vegetable diet, although not so radically as in his latest writings. His relaxation of dietetic reform quickly brought back his former maladies, and he again suffered severely. During the next ten or twelve years he continued to increase in corpulency, until he at last reached the enormous weight of thirty-two stones, and he describes his condition at this time as intolerable.[140] In 1725 he left Bath for London, to consult his friend Dr. Arbuthnot, whose advice probably renewed and confirmed his old inclination for the rational mode of living. At all events, within two years, by a strict adherence to the milk and vegetable regimen his maladies finally disappeared; nor did he afterwards suffer by any relapse into dietetic errors. In the preceding year had appeared his first important and original work--his well-known _Essay of Health and a Long Life_. In the preface he declares that it is published for the benefit of those weakly persons who “are able and willing to abstain from everything hurtful, and to deny themselves anything their appetites craved, to conform to any rules for a tolerable degree of health, ease, and freedom of spirits. It is for these, and these only,” he proceeds, “the following treatise is designed. The robust, the luxurious, the pot-companions, &c., have here no business; their time is not yet come.”