, to rejoice, or to
suffer; and we know how digestive power varies along the scale between
ecstacy and despair. In mental disease there is the same abnormal
structural change as in other local diseases; but for these sick
mind-centres there is no rest. There must be still thinking and feeling,
no matter how chaotic, to tax them, and there is no cheer to electrify
the stomach into easy display of power. We may well marvel that powers
so wonderful as the power to think, love, admire, see, hear, and feel
are located in structures so fragile as the brain; and we may well
marvel at the provision of the turret of flinty hardness to protect it
from violence.

Now we are to consider these centres of energy as abnormally weak in all
their structures at birth in those who become insane: these are the
luckless legacies from the fathers and the mothers, and for how far back
in the ancestral line we do not know. We are to consider that there is
the same abnormal condition of the cerebral bloodvessels and of the
softer inter-vascular structures as in other local diseases; and when
you recall the fact that everything that worries, that adds discomfort
to either mind or muscles, is a force that tends to develop weakness and
disease, you will see how it applies in the evolution of insanity.

Shall these fragile centres be permitted to rest when overwork has made
them sick, or is there any other rational means for their recovery?
Shall they not be permitted to rest when abundantly able to keep
physically nourished in a way that does not cause even the slightest
shade of discomfort?

Again, let it be borne in mind that recovery from acute disease is
attended with a revival of strength in every power that makes life worth
living, and that every person not acutely sick who has fasted under my
care or who has cut down the waste of brain power by less daily food has
found the same revival of power. To this there have been no exceptions.

What do we fear in sickness? Is it disease or the wasting pounds? Since
they will disappear when Nature would have the food-gate closed, since
they reappear when there is the highest possible reach of mere relish,
and when all the other senses have become more acute, and also when
existence has become almost ecstatic, why ever oppress the weak or sick
centres when Nature wills a rest?

The literature on the disease of the mind has become so massive in mere
bulk, in its physiological refinements, that it