Now we are to consider these centres of energy as abnormally weak in all their structures at birth in those who become insane: these are the luckless legacies from the fathers and the mothers, and for how far back in the ancestral line we do not know. We are to consider that there is the same abnormal condition of the cerebral bloodvessels and of the softer inter-vascular structures as in other local diseases; and when you recall the fact that everything that worries, that adds discomfort to either mind or muscles, is a force that tends to develop weakness and disease, you will see how it applies in the evolution of insanity. Shall these fragile centres be permitted to rest when overwork has made them sick, or is there any other rational means for their recovery? Shall they not be permitted to rest when abundantly able to keep physically nourished in a way that does not cause even the slightest shade of discomfort? Again, let it be borne in mind that recovery from acute disease is attended with a revival of strength in every power that makes life worth living, and that every person not acutely sick who has fasted under my care or who has cut down the waste of brain power by less daily food has found the same revival of power. To this there have been no exceptions. What do we fear in sickness? Is it disease or the wasting pounds? Since they will disappear when Nature would have the food-gate closed, since they reappear when there is the highest possible reach of mere relish, and when all the other senses have become more acute, and also when existence has become almost ecstatic, why ever oppress the weak or sick centres when Nature wills a rest? The literature on the disease of the mind has become so massive in mere bulk, in its physiological refinements, that it would require time with a long reach into eternity to go through it; but it has not come to my knowledge that it contains any reference to the brain as a self-nourishing, self-charging dynamo; that therefore the stomach is only a machine whose use can well be omitted for long periods when these centres of moral and intellectual energy have become worried into disease, with rest the only means, the only need for all the recovery possible. "Oh, you giants of the medical profession!" You who have been elected to preside over these great homes of the mentally wrecked because of your eminence in character, ability, experience, and professional attainments, do you deny the soundness of the physiology involved in this method of reaching health through Nature? Then let me array against you Alexander Haig, M. A., M. D. Oxon., F. R. C. P., Physician to the Metropolitan Hospital, and the Royal Hospital, and for Children and Women; late Casualty Physician to St. Bartholomew's Hospital. I quote from his exhaustive work, _Uric Acid in the Causation of Disease_: