MARCH 223 



doctor has ordered me to eat well,' and feels his conscience 

 absolved. This reminds me of a rather good old story 

 which a doctor told me, when I was a girl in Brussels, as 

 haying happened to himself. A bishop who was eating 

 stuffed turkey with this doctor on Good Friday excused 

 himself to a punctilious friend, who was shown into the 

 dining-room by accident, saying : ' Le docteur me le 

 commande, et moi je lui donne absolution.' But can one 

 imagine anything more hopelessly exasperating for poor 

 doctors, who have to make their living, than to find that 

 loss of patients is the result if they venture even to ask 

 in chronic cases what people eat and drink? We all 

 know how they knock off food in cases of serious illness, 

 though even then I think they still allow far too much. 

 During convalescence it is often desirable for the patient 

 to eat anything that he can digest. 



I know it will be said that the next generation may 

 suffer from the results of a low diet, as the doctors are 

 perpetually telling us that we have all suffered from 

 the port wine drinking and high living of our ancestors. 

 Nothing but time can prove this. 



In my youth heaps of doctors, especially on the 

 Continent, still believed in bleeding, particularly in fever 

 cases. Now this is as unknown as if it had never been 

 practised at all. Is this right or wrong ? 



I see even restaurants now advertise suppers which 

 are not indigestible ! An interesting pandering to the 

 growing faith that good health comes far before good 

 feeding. 



I was asked the other day to give a lecture on the 

 right spending of money. Oh ! what a fraud these 

 appeals to my knowledge or wisdom make me feel ! I 

 who have so little knowledge of figures that I cannot even 

 keep my own accounts ! But most certainly, if I were to 

 give a lecture, I should say to everyone, high and low : 



