s where infinite harm can be done to nervous people like
myself. People who can eat everything--and among physicians seemingly
there are many who can do so--will say to these poor sufferers:

"Why, it's all nonsense about things hurting you! Eat anything you want
and all you want and then forget about it."

Physicians have said that to me and during the past twenty years I have
heard them say it thousands of times to others.

Personally I do not believe in Christian Science--physicians of the
Regular school do not believe in it; but do you know that when a
physician says to a sufferer from "nerves," "It's all nonsense about
what you eat hurting you; eat anything you want and then forget about
it," that physician is fully endorsing Christian Science. He is telling
the person to whom he is talking that there is no such thing as physical
suffering. Of course, such a physician is nothing but a fool. Yet that's
why so many of these people turn to Christian Science. Yes, that is
exactly why they try it. It bolsters up a sufferer for a time just as
contact with a magnetic and hopeful personality may for a time bolster
one up. But such persons almost always go back to the sanitariums.
"Nerves" is not a mental disease; that is, the seat of the trouble is
not mental but physical, and the mental phase of "nerves" is only a
symptom, or rather one of the symptoms of the disease.

We people who have gone down into the dark valley have experienced a
million, more or less, different kinds of feelings. I fully believe one
half of the American people are the offspring of nervous parents. This
means that there are fifty-five million of this nervous type of
Americans. This type includes people all the way from the man in an
office who gets angry quickly, to the individual who is in a state of
complete collapse. And the man who is afflicted with nothing more than a
quick temper, or is living under high nervous tension, is liable to
beget children who will suffer from the malady in a far worse degree
than ever he will, unless, indeed, he eats only the things he should eat
and observes a number of other rules besides the two I have already laid
down.

Now, the ideal diet for nervous people is a slightly modified vegetarian
diet. To be specific, it is a Lacto-vegetarian diet minus eggs. There
are, however, two things included in this diet that I would warn one in
the beginning to eat of sparingly. These are bananas and cooked cabbage.
If