So never feel sorry or disappointed when the family physician makes a professional visit, and fails to write a prescription, but instead, gives you instruction in the art of feeding and nursing the patient. Food and stimulants support the strength of the system until the struggle between health and disease or between life and death is overcome, and thus cure the patient by not allowing him to starve. There is a large group of diseases for which there are no acknowledged remedies, and in which a properly selected and regulated diet forms the mainstay of successful treatment. This should be combined with healthy, clean rooms, proper ventilation, and other hygienic means which may suggest themselves to the intelligent practitioner. The patient’s fancy for this or that article of diet is no index, as a rule, of what is best suited for him; invalid appetites and cravings are abnormal; they are like that of the chlorotic girl who eats chalk and slate pencils, instead of wholesome food and some preparation of iron. An aversion to food is also no criterion of the patient’s need for nourishment, for the sense of taste is generally blunted or perverted. The desire for food is lost in all diseases of a catarrhal nature of the mouth or stomach, and in those that are characterized by high temperature. In typhoid fever and diseases of a typhoid nature this is always the case. With children this aversion to food is greater and more general than with adults; and it must be made a rule that their refusal to take nourishment must not be extended beyond several days, otherwise they fail so rapidly in conjunction with the disease as to perish from exhaustion. The repugnance to food arises from abnormal conditions that are generally localized in the mouth and especially in the parts of the tongue which are supplied by the nerves of taste; these nerves are the lingual branch of the trifacial and the glasso-pharyngeal. But notwithstanding that the food is almost tasteless, when it gets into the stomach it is retained and properly digested and the patient feels better for having taken it. An appetite can be thus cultivated, and after a few days of coaxing or perhaps of forcible feeding, which in children who are failing rapidly becomes necessary in order to save them, the taste and desire for nourishment become natural or restored. Quite often patients beg and plead not to be given food; but in wasting diseases it should be insisted that some at least should be taken (always liquid of course), and when they are sufficiently rational they will always afterward admit that the nourishment did them good.