On just two points I found a unanimity of opinion among what might be termed the middle group of dietetic explorers as counter-distinguished from the pioneering cult and the modern or comparatively modern.  Each one was so absolutely certain that he was so absolutely right and so absolutely certain that all his contemporaries were so absolutely wrong.

At the beginning, it seemed, a reduction of the sufferer’s flesh had been attempted by the simple device of bleeding him copiously—­not with a monthly statement, as latterly, but with a lancet.  Abundant drinking of vinegar also had been recommended as a means to accomplish the desired end.  They were noble drinkers in the olden times, but until I began delving into literature of the subject I did not suspect that there had been any out-and-out vinegar topers.

There was citation in an early work of the interesting case of the Marquis of Cortona, a subchieftain under the Duke of Alva, and a fine fat old butcher he must have been, too, by all tellings.  Finding himself grown so rotund that no longer could he enter with zest into the massacre bees and torture outings which the Spaniards were carrying on in the harried Netherlands, the marquis had recourse to vinegar; and so efficacious was the treatment that, as the tradition runs, he soon could wrap his loosened skin about him in great slack folds like a cloak, and thus, close-reefed, go merrily murdering his way across the Low Countries.

One pictures the advantages accruing.  In cold weather, now, he might overlap his wrinkles in a clapboarded effect and save the expense of laying in heavy underwear.  True, this might give to the wearer a clinker-built appearance; still it would keep him nice and warm, and no doubt he had his armor on outside the rest of his things.  But likewise there must have been drawbacks.  Suppose, now, the marquis were caught out in blowy weather and the wind worked in under his tucks and the ratlines pulled loose and, all full-rigged and helpless, bellying and billowing and flapping and jibing, he went scudding against his will before the gale.  Could he hope to tack and go about before he blew clear over into the next county?  I doubt it.

And suppose he inflated himself for a party or a reception or something, and a practical joker put a tack in a chair and he sat down on it and had a blow-out.  The thought is not a pretty one, yet the thing were possible.

From these crude beginnings I worked my way down toward the present day.  Doctor Banting, of England, the father of latter-day dietetics from whose name in commemoration of his services to mankind we derive the verb intransitive “to bant,” had theories wherein his chief contemporaneous German rival, Epstein the Bavarian, radically disagreed with him.  Voit, coming along subsequently, disagreed in important details with both.  Among the moderns I discerned where Dr. Woods Hutchinson had his pet ideas and Doctor Wiley had his, diametrically opposed.  So it went.  There was almost as much of disputation here as there is when a federation of women’s clubs is holding an annual election.  It was all so very confusing to one aiming to do the right thing.