eemingly beyond hope a fast of a month, or two months if necessary,
will cure any stomach or brain, no matter how pickled they are with
alcoholic soaking, and with only the least disturbance in the habit
breaking; even within a week the hardest of the fighting should be over
when the fast is made absolute.

XV.

I have now to consider briefly a most distressing disease, one that
perhaps was never cured by the power of doses, and that most happily
illustrates the structural changes in the cure of disease.

Asthmatic distress is caused by congestion of the terminals of the
bronchial tubes, by which entrance of air into the cells is made
difficult, even in some cases to the point of suffocation. This
condition as a disease may be called bronchial catarrh, as in most cases
there is such a condition of the larger tubes as to cause the habitual
raising of a discharge. As to the disease itself, you have only to
recall what has been said about nasal catarrh in order to understand its
origin and development. It would be as trivial a disease were it not for
the fact that those smaller and ultimate tubes, because of flabby walls
and weak vessels, become congested, with resulting narrowing of the
air-ways of life.

For this most distressing disease local treatments are as futile and
void of intelligence as the physiology and anatomy involved in cause and
cure of other local diseases. Is it not a great thing that those too
narrow ways of life may be reached through a fast which shall so charge
the brain with power that the flabby walls will be condensed; that most
cases of asthma may be cured, with marked relief for every case? This
is as certain as a result, as that rest restores strength. With the
toning of the brain through rest, a catarrh of the bronchial tubes is
certainly curable in most cases. With a large opportunity to know I am
able to say this with intense conviction.

Only a few months ago, just before the break of day, a freight train
took a side track; in a few moments, with nearly a mile-a-minute speed,
a limited passenger train took the same track, and in the time of a
second five men were hurled into eternity. Why? How? The conductor and
his brakeman were in such heavy sleep when the switch was opened that
they were not awakened to close it.

Why? How? There was the torpor of indigestion holding the tired brains
of those two men in its fatal grasp; their stomachs were full of food
when they were alrea