Part 10

"Fraternally yours,

"J. H. KELLOGG."

"BATTLE CREEK, MICH., Sept. 30, 1903.

"DEAR FRIEND:

"I have your kind note of the 23d inst. I am sure that one of my letters to you has been lost. I wrote promptly telling you that you were at liberty to use anything I have written you respecting your work.

"I am more and more enthusiastic respecting the value of thorough chewing. I have read with great interest Dr. Harry Campbell's articles, and am republishing in Modern Medicine a large part of what he has written.

"I have been thinking whether I might dare ask permission from you to publish your article 'What Sense' as a tract. Possibly it is already printed in that way. I would like to circulate it widely among my patients, and our nurses and doctors. I am doing my best to get them all to chewing, and have had great benefit myself from thorough mastication.

"Our Medical School has just begun again, and I have one nice class of sixteen students who are going to devote themselves to the study of applied physiology, and all of them will experiment on the effects of thorough mastication in relation to the quantity of food; also in relation to the quantity of proteids. If you would like the details of the results of the experiments, I will give them to you later.

"By the way, if you have any written or printed outline of data which you think it desirable to collect, I will be glad to have it as a help to us in researches of this sort. We have prepared our laboratory to do almost anything that needs to be done, and we have a whole lot of enthusiastic young men and women who will enter into this thing with great zeal, and we will be glad to coöperate with you thoroughly as I feel that you have introduced a line of research and investigation which is of immense importance. I have read with great interest Prof. Chittenden's article in the Popular Science Monthly, and I can but feel that you are a heaven-sent missionary to the world in this matter of diet reform.

"I remain,

"As ever your friend,

"J. H. KELLOGG."

"P. S.--I have for many years given a good deal of attention to the matter of mastication. It has been my regular prescription for all my patients for many years to eat at the beginning of each meal some Granose Flakes. The purpose of this was to secure increased activity of the salivary glands, and to encourage the habit of mastication. I have found immense benefit from this practice.

"I appreciate exceedingly all the good things you are sending me. What a delightful time you must have had in the Adirondacks! I have never had such a pleasure in my life, as I have had my nose continually on the grindstone at work since I was ten years of age, with no vacations at all. It is a remarkable spectacle that these great men, these learned professors and scientists, and army medical men, should be coöperating so enthusiastically with a layman to learn the true philosophy of life; but it has always been so. The great discoveries have not been made by great scientists and great doctors, but by men whose minds were above the bias of prescribed education, and who were able to learn from the great book of nature, which is the book of God.

"When you come again I hope you will have time to stay with us a little while so we can have some good chats. I would like to sit down and go into the heart of things with you, when I think we should find our ideas running very close together. We shall expect to see you next month. I have to be away for a few days sometime during the month, so I hope you will let me know a little while before you come about what time to expect you.

"J. H. K."

EXTRACTS FROM DR. EDWARD HOOKER DEWEY

(At the first writing Dr. Dewey had had the method of treating food commented on in his letters under trial for three years; it having been communicated to him by the author among the first.)

"MEADVILLE, PENN., Nov. 17th, 1901.

"MY DEAR MR. FLETCHER:

"In the line of dietary form you have done better work than the entire medical profession has done from the dawn of History. This matter of eating the way you preach and practise, serves wonderfully to save the waste of energy, which is a direct robbery of brain power, in the stomach. It also saves an undue waste of food, the burden of over-weight, and above all things, the waste of disease. You should enlarge 'Glutton or Epicure' and push it. My allusion to this little book in my last book has brought me many letters of inquiry, and I always commend it as a work of the highest practical importance.

"I have received the article of Dr. Van Someren, and I wish I had scores of them to send to my patients. I have read it with the greatest interest, and shall keep it most of the time in the mail pouches.

"In these latter times I am becoming more and more impressed with the results of over-food even with the well, until now I feel that the pussy belly is a matter so clearly attributable to gluttony as to be a cause of shame, at least, in the physiological sense....

"I hope you will feel it a duty to enlarge and expand the usefulness of 'Glutton or Epicure.' The people are ripe in this country for just such a book.... I feel that you are doing the most important work in physiological investigation of any living man, and we in this country, especially, need all your new material as an addition to the book...."

(Two years later; after five years' test.)

July 20th, 1903.

"What you have done to unfold physiologic mastication means more for human weal than all the mere medical prescribers have given the world from Adam to the present moment. I have tested the method you advise with the ailing, as you could not have had so large an opportunity to do. I have been having the care of fasters for the past twenty-six years, and now all of them, when they return to their healthy appetite and feeding, have to 'Fletcherise' every morsel. Just now a man has ended a thirty-two day fast under my care, and has begun taking food again, with an appetite and a relish that his memory does not recall having enjoyed before. He swallows nothing that is not reduced to thin liquid. Only occasional abstinence from food for a time and such attention to mastication, makes health possible with the majority of people, tempted by quantities of soft and rich foods. No other one has taught so wisely how available brain power can be saved from wastage in the stomach, as have you--the value is beyond all estimate.

"It has been given to me to become a teacher among those who have neither time nor means to cultivate health; mine to teach them how to get all the health possible, without the use of any of the health arts. In dispensing the new physiology of dietary rest I have had need of all the time possible, with none left for the experiments of science, hence I have done little or nothing to speak of in the experiment way suggested in your letters.