508. _Diet for Patients._--"I am every day asked by my patients, what diet they should take. I generally answer by the question, 'How old are you?' Suppose they say, _Forty_--'Forty!' I rejoin: 'you who have had forty years' experience of what agrees and disagrees with you--how can you ask me who have no experience of the kind in your case whatever?' Surely, gentlemen, a patient's experience of what agrees and disagrees with his own particular constitution, is far better than any theory of yours or mine. Why, bless my life! in many chronic diseases, the diet which a man can take to-day, would be rejected with disgust to-morrow; under such circumstances, would you still, according to common medical practice, tell a sick person to go on taking what he himself found worried him to death? Gentlemen, I hope better things of you. "The only general caution you need give your patients on the subject of diet, is _moderation_; moderation in using the things which they find agree with themselves best. You may direct them to take their food in small quantities at a time, at short _periodic_ intervals--intervals of two or three hours, for example; and tell them to take the trouble to masticate it properly before they swallow it, so as not to give a weak stomach the _double_ work of mastication and digestion--these processes being, even in health, essentially distinct. Unless properly comminuted and mixed with the saliva, how can you expect the food to be anything but a source of inconvenience to persons whom the smallest trifle will frequently discompose?"--_Dr. Dickson's Lectures._ 509. _Abstinence, or Starvation._--Beware of carrying this too far!--for "abstinence engenders maladies." So Shakspeare said, and so nature will tell you, in the teeth of all the doctors in Europe! Abstinence may produce almost every form of disease which has entered into the consideration of the physician.--_Ibid._