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or Europeans when put on a diet of nothing but meat and water,
gradually begin to experience dislike and finally a revulsion
against their food. Through extensive experience in the North, I
had learned that this revulsion is a psychological symptom. Those
who expect to become tired of a diet do become tired of it much
quicker than those who have been convinced in advance that they will
not tire of it. Those who become nauseated by an exclusively meat
diet get over that trouble in a few days or at the most a few weeks
and are thereafter never troubled. This we had proved repeatedly
in our [l.c work] and Dr. Lieb wanted me to undertake living on
meat for a few weeks in New York to demonstrate the point that many,
most, or all the bad results noted by previous experimenters had
been due to the psychological reactions of the patients. I was
eager for such an experiment but the trouble was that the subject
has to stay in one place under constant watching for several weeks
at a time, and I am always very busy. Dr. Lieb now wanted to make
this experiment on Mr. Noice, the idea being that, since he would
have to remain for a long time quiescent in any case with his
shoulder in a cast we could kill two birds with one stone by his undergoing
the dietetic experiment at the same time. Dr. Lieb undertook to
try to find the money for paying the surgeon to reset the shoulder
and also for conducting the dietetic experiment. He was temporarily
unsuccessful, however, in getting the necessary funds, equipment and
men to conduct and watch the experiment. Hr. Noice also developed
a reluctance to being experimented upon. He did not say this to
Dr. Lieb or myself, but he did tell others and they reported it
back to us. This would have made him a less desirable subject
than otherwise, for one of the conditions Dr. Lieb wanted was an
optimistic willingness. I decided, therefore, to let the experiment