Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/374

 MARK TWAIN

appetite was kept at par through the difficulty of getting his bear-meat regularly.&quot;

1 But doctors arrange carefully considered and delicate diets for invalids.&quot;

&quot;They can t help it. The invalid is full of in herited superstitions and won t starve himself. He believes it would certainly kill him.&quot;

&quot;It would weaken him, wouldn t it?&quot;

&quot;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 starva tion. 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 perceive that; they lost their opportunity; they remained invalids; it served them right. Do you know the tricks that the health- resort doctors play?&quot;

&quot;What is it?&quot; &quot;

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 ac customed to four meals and late hours at both ends of the day now consider what he has to do at a health resort. He gets up at six in the morning. Eats one egg. Tramps up and down a promenade two hours with the other fools. Eats a butterfly. Slowly drinks a glass of filtered sewage that smells like a buzzard s breath. Promenades another two hours, but alone; if you speak to him he says

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