My life : a record of events and opinions - Wallace-online.org

310 MY LIFEDr. Salisbury, however, has experimentally provedthat this class of ailments is due to malnutrition, andthat this malnutrition is most frequently caused bymeals,the consumption of too much starch food at allwhich overloads the stomach and prevents properdigestion and assimilation. My case and that of Mr.Bruce-Joy certainly show that Dr. Salisbury hasfound, for the first time in the history of medicine, a(^^,yg—not merely an alleviation—for these painful anddistressing maladies. This personal detail as to myhealth is, I think, of general interest in view of thelarge number of sufferers who are pronounced incurableby English doctors, and it was here anessential preliminary to the facts I have now torelate, which would probably not have occurred asthey did had my health not been so strikinglyrenovated.The lecture which I gave at Davos on the scienceof the nineteenth century (a subject suggested by Dr.Lunn) led me to think that an instructive and popularbook might be made of the subject, as I found therewere so many interesting points I could not treatadequately or even refer to in a lecture. I thereforedevoted most of my spare time during the next yearto getting together materials and writing the volume,which I finished in the spring of 1898, and it waspublished in June under the title of " The WonderfulCentury." At the request of my publishers I preparedfrom it a School Reader, with a considerablenumber of illustrations, which was published in 1901.This suggested the idea of a much enlarged andillustrated edition of the original work, which was, asregards many of the more important sciences and arts,Almost all the year 1902 anda mere outline sketch.part of 1903 was occupied in getting together materials