I feel that I need not multiply words as to the ability and utility of bringing all overweight down to the physiological normal and of keeping it there. I could fill hundreds of pages with the joyous testimonies of those who have been relieved of many surplus pounds, with numerous accompanying ailings; they all tell the same story, and I will only add this, that there is no physiological excuse for any mortal to carry around weight that disables.
Not very many months ago ex-Governor Flower, of New York, a statesman of national fame, a man of largest public spirit, a most valuable citizen, and Colonel Robert Ingersoll, an orator of world-wide fame and of great nobility of soul, dropped as beeves beneath the stroke of an ax because of a fracture of brittle bloodvessels. In both of these cases not many less pounds than a hundred had needlessly accumulated.
Could I have had the Colonel's ear when I last saw him as a listener to almost matchless oratory, whose rotundity of belt was to be measured by the yard, I would have addressed him as follows: "My dear Colonel, when I last saw you you were just filled out enough to be the joy of your tailor, and as a picture of health in form and looks you were ideal. You were then eating the meals of a woodchopper; and merely because food tastes good and does not seem to hurt you, you have been doing the same during the nearly score and a half of years since I have seen you. You have been eating more food every day in proportion to general muscle exercise than the hardest toiler does in a week, and your vast bulk evidences against you."
After explaining to him the structural possibilities of apoplexy as a legacy, as I have to you in the cases of insanity, I would continue: "Now by virtue of a possible ancestral weakness of your brain arteries this may happen: the arterial walls, because of habitual food in excess, may undergo a fatty, limy degeneration that will make a rupture possible, with death or paralysis of one-half or more of the body as the direct result; or the small arteries may have their walls so thickened as not to permit enough blood to circulate in order duly to nourish parts of the brain they supply; hence softening of the structure and more or less imbecility.
"The history of all overweights is that of a decline of muscle energy, and very generally of the amount of muscle activity as the pounds and years increase; but no cut in the amount of daily food so long as it can be taken with relish and disposed of without any special protesting from the stomach. This is the history of by far the largest majority of those sudden deaths due to cerebral hemorrhage, and also the history of most of the cases of imbecility with the overweights.
"Now, Colonel, you should make a radical parting with those surplus pounds by a fast that may extend into months, or take one of the lightest of meals once a day. Follow this out rigidly until you have lost a hundred pounds, and then by as much will you be not only free from disease, but free also from the danger of disease."
My experience with cases of epilepsy, or "fits," is confined to a half dozen cases, in which permanent relief seems to be assured. There is an acquired structural abnormality behind the spasms, acquired from surplus food, with a cure to be reached ultimately in most cases along these physiological lines.
XIV.
I shall not take time in telling the evils of alcoholics. It would not be more enlightening were I to spend hours in telling of wrecked lives, of wrecked homes, of prisons filled with their victims, of the immense loss to states and nations from the loss to sufferers and the loss they inflict. Alcoholism has no sense for frowning, ominous statistics, for it is a disease to be rationally treated, a disease to be rationally avoided.