"The more I study the question of nutrition in disease at the bedside of acute illness the more am I unable to comprehend the logic of giving the sick, and especially the very sick, a form of food that even in the most vigorous health cannot be borne, even for a single day, without a lowering of vital power; nay, that where even one meal of it cannot be put into the stomach of hunger without a clearly perceptible loss of power.
"No physician will admit that normal health can be maintained for a single day, for the above reasons, on milk and whisky; then where is the logic of feeding it to the sick? How expect, by its use, to raise abnormal health to the normal, when it inevitably lowers the normal to the abnormal?
"Most of the need of drugs to allay restlessness or pain, and to enforce sleep in cases of the severely sick, arises from the exhaustive taxing of the vital power from the enforced feeding and stimulation."—E. H. Dewey, M.D.
There is no danger in temporary abstinence. Nature knows best. . . . Accustom yourself in all your little ailments, and also in your grave and more distressing affections, to regard the movement concerned in them in a friendly aspect
