At first blush it might appear to the lay mind that a germ would scarcely care to pick a bone when it had fat meat to feed on, but my own recollections bore out my friend’s statements.  I remembered a man of my acquaintance, an enormously fleshy and unwieldy man, who, fearing apoplexy, undertook a radical scheme of banting.  He lost fifty pounds in three months, so apoplexy did not get him, but pneumonia did with great suddenness.  He was sick only three days.  Nobody suspected that he was seriously ill until the third day, when suddenly he just hauled off and died.

So I promised to have a care against seeking to hurry myself right out of the flounder class and right into the smelt division.

CHAPTER VIII

The Friendly Sons of the Boiled Spinach

My friend gave me the names of several men of acknowledged standing and told me I should be making no mistake did I put myself in the hands of any one on the list.  I thanked him and departed from his presence.  To the casual eye I may have seemed, going away, to be in high spirits; but, confidentially, I wasn’t feeling so very brash.  My spirits were low.  I had heard the truth—­I made no effort to deceive myself there—­but the truth was painful.

Still, knowing what I should do, I hesitated, temporizing with myself.  I gave a couple of days of intensive meditation to the subject, and then I reached this conclusion:  I would read a few standard and orthodox works on dietetics, and, so doing, try to arrive at least at a superficial knowledge of the matter.  Also, I would balance what one recognized authority said as against what another recognized authority said, and then, before going to a specialist, I would do a little personal experimenting with my diet and mark the effects.

I arrived at this decision privately, taking no one into my confidence.  And without an intent to deprive any hard-worked specialist of a prospective fee, I shall ever continue to believe that the second part of the course I chose to follow was a wise one.  It might not serve my brother-in-obesity, but it served me well.  I’m sure of that.

But the first part of the system naturally came first.  This had to do with research work among the best authorities.  Here I struck one of the snags that rise in the pathway of the hardy soul who goes adventuring into any given department of the science of medicine and its allied sciences.  I was pained to observe how rare it was for two experts, of whatsoever period, to agree upon a single essential element.  An amateur investigator was left at a loss to fathom why such entirely opposite conclusions should have been arrived at by the members of the same school when presumably both had had the same raw materials to work on.  By their raw materials I mean their patients.  But so it was.

The ancient apostles of dietetics, the original pathfinders into a hitherto untracked field, had disciples who set out to follow in their footsteps, but before they had traveled very far along the alimentary trail the disciples were quarreling bitterly with the masters’ deductions and conclusions.  To-day’s school was snooty touching on the major opinions of yesterday’s crowd, and to-morrow’s crowd already made faces at to-day’s.