If I am to be governed by impressions as to the utility of what I may do for the sick, what is more impressive than to draw blood as they of old did, with recovery in most cases? Have we reduced the mortality of disease by a change in dosage? If so, how much, apart from the better sanitary conditions of living and from those involved in the care of the sick? I can easily see or believe there is utility in clearing the digestive tract at an early date in the case of severe sickness; I know that stomach and bowels are as machines run by brain power; but beyond this the materia medica is summed up in this way, "I dose my sick: they get well: therefore my treatment is successful; or if they die, it is the providence of God"--and with no thought that it may have been the providence of bad treatment. Men and brethren of the medical profession, you believe me a heretic in all my professional modes, and only endure me because I do not carry violent hands; but you would bar the sick-room from the bleeder of old. I may attack the lancet, the herbs, the ground-roots, whose doses were only as kindling-wood and sawdust a little more refined, and you will say "Amen" with emphasis. "But we, we live in a more enlightened age: our doses are more refined"--yes, but you administer them with the same force of conviction as to their utility in the cure of disease, and with little thought as to just why they are given and how they act. It is my present conception that feeding the sick as now very generally practised will be held, in a more enlightened age, as we now hold the lancet of a darker age--a twin relic of barbarism; and there will be only wonder that attempts were ever made to convert the lower bowel into a temporary stomach _thirty feet away_. How discriminating this deputy stomach that it selects the predigested food-ration from its unutterable lower bowel involvements; sending it pure and undefiled as ready-made flesh into the blood, only requiring it to be placed as bricks to a wall. Fortunately, these lower stomachs are not subject to nausea no matter how capable of otherwise rebelling, as they so often do. Predigested foods! If they nourish the sick, why not feed the well; why not abolish our kitchens at an immense saving in the time, expense, and worry of cooking, and live on them at an immense saving of the tax of digestion and the indigestive processes? Brethren of the medical profession, make haste to let the world know when you have found a case in which you have made use of the lower bowel so to nourish the sick body that it did not waste while the cure was going on. THE FASTING-CURE. XI. NOTES AND PRESS COMMENTS ON VOLUNTARY FASTS.