Let us consider those rooms of bedlam you call the "excitable wards." They who enter leave all hope (of the friends) behind. Is there special need in these regions of despair and mental chaos that the mere pounds and strength shall be kept up? What will be lost by protracted fasts? Nothing in the kitchen. As for the brain and those sick centres, they will feed themselves until the last heart-beat sends the last available nourishment to the remotest cell. Will the functions of the brain grow more abnormal by a suspension of digestive drafts upon it? Does rest to anything that is tired tend to the abnormal? Again I ask, What will be lost by protracted fasts in such cases? Nothing but weight, of which the fat will be by far the larger part. Would there be worry about starvation? With most of the cases there is not mind enough to worry over anything from the standpoint of reason. The very fact of the absence of the sense of the importance of daily food would render fasts in the highest degree practical and successful. The fasts could be instituted with the certainty of a calmer condition of mind as soon as the digestive tract would cease to call upon the brain for power, and with the probability that a surprising degree of improvement would be manifest in all, and long before the available body-food for the brain would be exhausted. Gentlemen, you have treated acute sickness in all its forms, and you have had many cases in which, because of irritable stomachs, neither food nor medicine could be given. Day after day you have seen the wasting of the bodies, and you have also seen mental aberration or stupor lessen day by day as the disease lessened its grasp upon the brain-centres, and finally when the point of natural hunger was reached, you never found the lost pounds a matter of physical discomfort or mental abnormality or weakness; rather you have always found at this point a mental condition in every way the most highly satisfactory. I never saw brighter eyes, a happier expression on every line, than revealed by a woman after a fast of forty-four days, in which acute disease had reduced the weight forty pounds. All overweight not due to dropsy or other disease is due to eating more food than the waste demands. As an abnormal condition overweight has received a great deal of attention in the way of misguided effort to both prevention and cure. These efforts are such conspicuous failures that even the patent medicine man has not found his "anti-fat nostrums" the happy means to fortune. There have been all kinds of limits built around bills of fare, but sooner or later Nature revolts and they are given up.