Health-foods, health-corsets, health-boots, the deeply serious consideration of how to eat, on which side to sleep, profound examination of whether mutton or lamb were the more digestible flesh,—­these were her occupations,—­and two or three years before her panic about her health had been made worse by the discovery of an aortic stenosis, of which an over-frank doctor had thought it best to inform her.  When I saw her she had been three years married, was childless, and, between the real cardiac disease and her own anxieties about it, had driven herself into a state of great physical debility and a mental condition approaching delusional insanity.

A too restricted diet, lacking both in variety and appetizingness, had had its usual result of upsetting digestion and destroying desire for food.  Even with the small amounts which she ate she considered it necessary to chew so carefully and to feed herself so slowly that from one hour to an hour and a half was used for each meal.  The heart, under-nourished, beat feebly, there was constant slight albuminuria with evidences of congested kidneys, and she could only rest in a semi-erect position.

The heart condition, with its renal results, proved the most rebellious part of the trouble.  A firm and intelligent nurse soon overcame the difficulties and delays about food, and my final refusal to discuss them disposed for the time of some of the fanciful theories about digestion and so on.  Her meals were ordered in every detail, and she was told that they were prescribed and to be taken like medicine, and, fed by the nurse, she began to take more nourishment.  Massage relieved some of the labor of the heart, and gradually the semi-erect posture was exchanged inch by inch for a semi-recumbent one.  Not to prolong the relation of details, it was found needful to keep this lady in bed for five months before the heart seemed to recover sufficiently to allow her to get up.  Even then, although improved in color, flesh, and blood condition, she had to attain an erect station almost as slowly as she had had to reach recumbency.  Slow, active Swedish movements, to which gentle resistance movements were very gradually added, helped the heart.  Her cure was completed by five or six months’ camp-life in the woods, and she is now the mother of a healthy child and herself perfectly well, the valvular disease only to be detected by the most careful examination, and never, even during pregnancy and parturition, causing any annoyance.

The surgeons, who once thought a floating kidney could be permanently fixed in its place by stitching, have now concluded that this is very doubtful, and the treatment of this displacement is never very satisfactory by any method.  Still, some success has followed long rest in the supine position, which encourages the kidney to return to its normal place, until careful full feeding has renewed or increased the fatty cushions which hold it up.  It is best during the first