consoled myself in those days with the thought that some day I
should know; I believed that the fault was with me, that I was
lacking in diagnostic ability, and that by hard work the time would
come when I could read disease by its symptoms as well as the best,
for I then thought the big men of the profession knew everything
they pretended to know This was my ambition, but the ability to size
up symptoms under given conditions and tell their true worth forever
eluded me and kept me in a state of unrest and discontent that was
next to ruining my life. If light had not come when it did I should
have abandoned the profession, but it came accidentally; it could
not come otherwise for I did not know how to look for it. In the
course of time I stored in my memory many cases that from accident
or caprice had recovered without drugs and food. The satisfactory
advance made by sick people, suffering from different diseases, when
they were left without food or drugs, occurred so often, and with
such unvarying regularity that it ceased to be a coincident--it was
absurd for me to continue to explain the results by the hackneyed
word "coincident," a word that is usually loaded with a lot of
dogmatism, idleness and selfishness.

When I accepted the changes, taking place _without medical aid,
interruption and interference, _as true cures, and so much a part of
nature, and so intimately blended with the fixed laws of nature that
like results could be looked for with the same degree of certainty
that we look for the rising or setting of the sun, I busied myself
in formulating a plan of cure as nearly in accordance with natural
laws as I could. I am now, and have been for twenty years,
developing in this line, and I have gone far enough to declare that
I have watched symptoms start, mature, and decline, and in this way
have learned, by contrasting the symptoms in a given ease that has