n stomach, where there is no hunger and no mind
left to know the need? Is it to maintain that strength which costs you
so much muscle at every feeding. Or is it that it would be a danger to
lose a few pounds of body while Nature gets ready to ask for food in
the gentlest and most persuasive way? Whatever there is in appeal to the
best in any human life to uplift it from the deepest depths, you have at
the readiest command. You seem amply equipped to reach everything but
those sick, afflicted, oppressed brain-centres. You treat everything but
these, but to these you are worse than the Egyptian task-masters in that
you force needless labor where rest alone is the need. It is not bricks
without straw, but labor with exhausted power; and for all your efforts
you simply maintain weight at a tremendous cost to the energy of cure.
In no class of patients is rest for the brain more indicated than in
yours; in none are the means so at command and the results for good so
promising. With your patients the importance of time for business or
social use is no more a concern; the abnormal is all due to disease.

Let us consider those rooms of bedlam you call the "excitable wards."
They who enter leave all hope (of the friends) behind. Is there special
need in these regions of despair and mental chaos that the mere pounds
and strength shall be kept up? What will be lost by protracted fasts?
Nothing in the kitchen. As for the brain and those sick centres, they
will feed themselves until the last heart-beat sends the last available
nourishment to the remotest cell. Will the functions of the brain grow
more abnormal by a suspension of digestive drafts upon it? Does rest to
anything that is tired tend to the abnormal?

Again I ask, What will be lost by protracted fasts in such cases?
Nothing but weight, of which the fat will be by far the larger part.
Would there be worry about starvation? With most of the cases there is
not mind enough to worry over anything from the standpoint of reason.
The very fact of the absence of the sense of the importance of daily
food would render fasts in the highest degree practical and successful.

The fasts could be instituted with the certainty of a calmer condition
of mind as soon as the digestive tract would cease to call upon the
brain for power, and with the probability that a surprising degree of
improvement would be manifest in all, and long before the available
body-food for the brain would be exhau