With the evidence and interest just outlined, it was not difficult
for the author to enlist the coöperation of Surgeon-General O'Reilly
of the United States Army and the endorsement of General Leonard
Wood for larger investigation of the subject. These officers,
both of them surgeons and medical doctors, had supported the
militant-martyr-scientist, Dr. Major Walter Reed, in his great
sanitary accomplishment; had fought yellow fever to a finish together
in Cuba; had traced its spread to a specific cause; and were thereby
encouraged to tackle even so common and powerful enemies as Indigestion
and Mal-Assimilation.
The investigation now in progress at Yale University, under the
direction of Professor Chittenden and under the fostering auspices
of the Trustees of the _Bache Fund_, which is administered by the
National Academy of Sciences, and other contributed support, is a
Militant-Scientific campaign which will not cease until we know as much
about human nutrition, at least, as we know about the nutrition of our
domestic animals.
In this little book, however, is an account of the first distress and
war cry, (to appropriate an expression of the Salvation Army), and
while the workers in Science may take a considerable time to make
observations and investigate the "reasons for things," the underlying
claims herein stated will, it is believed, ultimately be established as
fundamental facts of both Hygiene and Physiology.
The psychic factor in digestion is even more important than originally
claimed by the author, and fully accounts for the strength attained by
the Christian Science movement.
In the "A.B.-Z. of Our Own Nutrition" are reprinted, for recent
scientific reports, in addition to the papers of Dr. Van Someren and
Professor Chittenden, before mentioned, articles and lectures by Dr.
Professor Pawlow, the great Russian physiologist and one of the Board
of Assessors in the International Nutrition Investigation, described in
the "A.B.-Z.," (reprinted from the fine English Translation by Dr. W.
H. Thompson, of Trinity College, Dublin; English publishers, Griffin &
Co.; American publishers, Lippincott & Co.), on the mental influence
over the salivary, gastric, and intestinal secretions. Also, nearly an
hundred pages of most virile, readable, and important "Observations on
Mastication," by Dr. Harry Campbell, M.D., F.R.C.P., of the North-west
London Hospital; reprinted by courteous permission of the author and
of the editor of the _Lancet_. Also, a description of the digestive
process in animals as seen by aid of the Röntgen, or X-Ray; a most
readable account of the infinite patience and application of Dr. W. B.
Cannon, of the Harvard Medical School, devoted to learning the "reasons
for things" done in the closed and secret laboratory of the stomach and
intestines.
The above is a necessary advertisement of another volume in the A.B.C.
Life Series; because the details of this particular attempt to reduce
the philosophy of every-day life to profitable simples is linked-up in
several volumes developed in the course of study of the subject for
location of the germinal causes.
"Menticulture" was the first of the series and relates to the
individual. "Happiness" came next and located the chief enemy of
happiness in _Fearthought_, the unprofitable element of forethought.
"That Last Waif" treated the question as related to the Social Whole,
children in particular, and recommended _Social Quarantine_; by
extension of infant education to the extreme of allowing no child to
escape educational care. This present treatise deals with the first
requirement of such infantile care and education, right feeding.