In the course of my experimentation, whenever I have fed my cold as far as I wished or dared to go, I have, in every instance, banished the disease by abstaining from food and indulging in extra rations of outdoor air——rain or shine. I have never known this remedy to fail of “breaking up” a common cold in twenty-four to forty-eight hours, whatever the age, sex, or occupation of the individual, and regardless of the supposed origin of the disease. Of course the size of the “dose” must bear some relation to the severity of the disorder. Whenever I have chosen to prolong one of these experiments by continuing to eat heartily, as is customary with people in general, I have found my experience identical with that of others: the symptoms would increase in severity, and to acute catarrh, headache, slight feverishness, and languor, would be added sore throat, perhaps, with pressure at the lungs, hoarseness, increased fever, and entire indisposition for exertion. In this case two, perhaps three, days’ fasting (one, maybe two, in bed) would be required, with a little extra sponging of the skin, to reduce the fever and completely restore the balance. I have, to be sure, never been reckless enough to subject my system to the influence of impure air——to the quality of air, for example, that is the daily and nightly reliance of ninety and nine families in the hundred, rich or poor, in the city or country——this I would never do; and for this reason my “colds” would be less severe, other things equal, than those of my neighbors, and more readily amenable to “treatment”; but the principle holds good in all cases. There are all degrees of obtuseness observable in the mental efforts of our fellow-creatures: I have had persons reply to this, that they “couldn’t agree” with me entirely in my position, for they had “tried the remedy,” when, in fact, as they would more or less hesitatingly admit, they had kept up their three-meal feeding, even after the appetite had passed the craving stage and the fitful stage; and even after food became loathsome they had punished themselves more or less _gruelly_; but, finally, driven to the wall, and eating little or nothing for a few days or weeks, because it was physically impossible to eat more, they have the assurance to declare, or the sublime stupidity to believe, that they have tried the fasting-cure, and that while “it might cure some,” it wouldn’t answer for them! And they usually add——of all aphorisms the most foolish and misleading——“one’s meat, another’s poison.”[12] It results, in such cases, that, if the individual recovers, he does so as the effect of seven-eighths starvation, involuntarily practiced, and extending over a period of weeks or months, when a few days of total abstinence early enough in the contest, before the appetite declined, would have saved the system from the depletion of a long-continued strain.