"Dear Mr. Fletcher:
"You may freely state my views of the value of the work you have done for humanity better than I have done. Know this; I am not able to adequately express my own appreciation of it, as revealed in the rooms of the ailing throughout several years of experience, by any language at my command. Here is something formal, if you like to use it.
"Yours with admiration and gratitude,
"E. H. Dewey."
"P. S. The matter of thorough mastication, as unfolded and insisted on by Horace Fletcher, is the greatest practical physiology that a dyspeptic, gluttonous world ever has received. The mouth-work, in saving the strain of overwork in the stomach and in the intestines, will do more to prevent disease than all other precautions. This is all the more wonderful when it is considered that Mr. Fletcher is a layman.[4]
"Here is the physiology involved, as I find the effect of it in the sick-room. Theoretically, digestion may take place far down in the digestive tract, but it is practically found that when this possibility is resorted to, by reason of neglect of the earlier buccal or gastric digestion, trouble soon happens, and we doctors are called in to try to effect cures by medicine or otherwise. For every one horse-power of work, as it were, that is slighted in the mouth, it requires perhaps ten horse-power of energy to repair the neglect further on, and all of this waste of energy is charged against the brain-power, pleasure-power reserve on storage.
"As I read the account of Mr. Fletcher's showing of heat-economy, reported by Professor Chittenden in his Popular Science Monthly article, and which was verified in the calorimeter measurement at Middletown, I see at once, from my own observations, that half the heat commonly used in the human engine is occupied in forcing the unnecessary waste through thirty feet of intestinal folds and convolutions."
The author feels very grateful to Dr. Dewey, not alone for his encouragement, but for the service he has rendered humanity by his heroic stand for temperance in feeding. He is one of the sturdy Esculapian Luthers, whose cry of reform comes from the impulse of an inborn Christian Altruism.
When it becomes generally known, as it some day will be, that overeating and wrong-eating are the prime causes of temptation to intemperance in drinking, the measure of Dr. Dewey's service to the Temperance Cause will be better appreciated.