'
'But doctors arrange carefully considered and delicate diets for
invalids.'
'They can't help it. The invalid is full of inherited superstitions and
won't starve himself. He believes it would certainly kill him.'
'It would weaken him, wouldn't it?'
'Nothing to hurt. Look at the invalids in our shipwreck. They lived
fifteen days on pinches of raw ham, a suck at sailor-boots, and general
starvation. It weakened them, but it didn't hurt them. It put them in
fine shape to eat heartily of hearty food and build themselves up to a
condition of robust health. But they did not know enough to profit by
that; they lost their opportunity; they remained invalids; it served them
right. Do you know the trick that the health-resort doctors play?'
'What is it?'
'My system disguised--covert starvation. Grape-cure, bath-cure,
mud-cure--it is all the same. The grape and the bath and the mud make a
show and do a trifle of the work--the real work is done by the
surreptitious starvation. The patient accustomed to four meals and late
hours--at both ends of the day--now consider what he has to do at a
health resort.
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