The Fasting Cure (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

Visit the link below to download the full version of this book:

https://medipdf.com/product/the-fasting-cure-barnes-noble-digital-library/

Click Download Now

 Contents

PREFACE
PERFECT HEALTH
A Letter to the New York Times
SOME NOTES ON FASTING
Fasting and the Doctors
THE HUMORS OF FASTING
A SYMPOSIUM ON FASTING
Death during the Fast
Fasting and the Mind
Diet after the Fast
THE USE OF MEAT
APPENDIX
Some Letters from Fasters
The Fruit and Nut Diet
The Rader Case
Horace Fletcher's Fast
 PREFACE

IN the Cosmopolitan Magazine for May 1910, and in the Contemporary

Review (London) for April 1910, I published an article dealing with my
experiences in fasting. I have written a great many magazine articles, but
never one which attracted so much attention as this. The first day the
magazine was on the news-stands, I received a telegram from a man in
Washington who had begun to fast and wanted some advice; and thereafter I
received ten or twenty letters a day from people who had questions to ask or
experiences to narrate. At the date of writing eight months have passed, and
the flood has not yet stopped. The editors of the Cosmopolitan also tell me
that they have never received so many letters about an article in their
experience. Still more significant was the number of reports which began to
appear in the news columns of papers all over the country, telling of people
who were fasting. From various sources I have received about fifty such
clippings, and few but reported benefit to the faster.
As a consequence of this interest, I was asked by the Cosmopolitan to
write another article, which appeared in the issue of February 1911. The
present volume is made up from these two articles, with the addition of
some notes and comments, and some portions of articles contributed to the
Physical Culture magazine, of the editorial staff of which I am a member. It
was my intention at first to work this matter into a connected whole, but
upon rereading the articles I decided that it would be better to publish them
as they stood. The journalistic style has its advantages; and repetitions may
perhaps be pardoned in the case of a topic which is so new to almost every
one.
I have reproduced in the book several photographs of myself which
appeared in the magazine articles. Ordinarily one does not print his picture
in his own books; but when it comes to fasting there are many "doubting
Thomases," and we are told that "seeing is believing." The two photographs
of myself which appear as a frontispiece afford evidence of a really
extraordinary physical recuperation; and the reader has my word for it that
there was nothing in my way of life to account for it, except three fasts, of a
total of thirty days.
There is one other matter to be referred to. Several years ago I published a
book entitled "Good Health," written in collaboration with a friend. I could
not express my own views fully in that book, and on certain points where I
differed with my collaborator, I have come since to differ still more. The
book contains a great deal of useful information; but later experience has
convinced me that its views on the all-important subject of diet are
erroneous. My present opinions I have given in this book. I am not saying
this to apologize for an inconsistency, but to record a growth. In those days
I believed something, because other people told me; today I know
something else, because I have tried it upon myself.
My object in publishing this book is two-fold: first, to have something to
which I can refer people, so that I will not have to answer half a dozen
"fasting letters" every day for the rest of my life; and second, in the hope of
attracting sufficient attention to the subject to interest some scientific men
in making a real investigation of it. Today we know certain facts about what
is called "autointoxication"; we know them because Metchnikoff, Pawlow
and others have made a thorough-going inquiry into the subject. I believe
that the subject of fasting is one of just as great importance. I have stated
facts in this book about myself; and I have quoted many letters which are
genuine and beyond dispute. The cures which they record are altogether
without precedent, I think. The reader will find in the course of the book
(page 63) a tabulation of the results of 277 cases of fasting. In this number
of desperate cases, there were only about half a dozen definite and
unexplained failures reported. Surely it cannot be that medical men and
scientists will continue for much longer to close their eyes to facts of such
vital significance as this.
I do not pretend to be the discoverer of the fasting cure. The subject was
discussed by Dr. E. H. Dewey in books which were published thirty or forty
years ago. For the reader who cares to investigate further, I mention the
following books, which I have read with interest and profit. I recommend
them, although, needless to say, I do not agree with everything that is in
them: "Fasting for the Cure of Disease," by Dr. L. B. Hazzard; "Perfect
Health," by C. C. Haskell; "Fasting, Hydrotherapy and Exercise," by
Bernard Macfadden; "Fasting, Vitality and Nutrition," by Hereward
Carrington. Also I will add that Mr. C. C. Haskell, of Norwich, Conn.,
conducts a correspondence-school dealing with the subject of fasting, and
that fasting patients are taken charge of at Bernard Macfadden's
Healthatorium, 42d Street and Grand Boulevard, Chicago, III., and by Dr.
Linda B. Hazzard, of Seattle, Washington.
 PERFECT HEALTH

PERFECT HEALTH!
Have you any conception of what the phrase means? Can you form any
image of what would be your feeling if every organ in your body were
functioning perfectly? Perhaps you can go back to some day in your youth,
when you got up early in the morning and went for a walk, and the spirit of
the sunrise got into your blood, and you walked faster, and took deep
breaths, and laughed aloud for the sheer happiness of being alive in such a
world of beauty. And now you are grown older—and what would you give
for the secret of that glorious feeling? What would you say if you were told
that you could bring it back and keep it, not only for mornings, but for
afternoons and evenings, and not as something accidental and mysterious,
but as something which you yourself have created, and of which you are
completely master?
This is not an introduction to a new device in patent medicine advertising.
I have nothing to sell, and no process patented. It is simply that for ten years
I have been studying the ill health of myself and of the men and women
around me. And I have found the cause and the remedy. I have not only
found good health, but perfect health; I have found a new state of being, a
new potentiality of life; a sense of lightness and cleanness and joyfulness,
such as I did not know could exist in the human body. "I like to meet you on
the street," said a friend the other day. "You walk as if it were such fun!"
I look about me in the world, and nearly everybody I know is sick. I could
name one after another a hundred men and women, who are doing vital
work for progress and carrying a cruel handicap of physical suffering. For
instance, I am working for social justice, and I have comrades whose help is
needed every hour, and they are ill! In one single week's newspapers last
spring I read that one was dying of kidney trouble, that another was in
hospital from nervous breakdown, and that a third was ill with ptomaine
poisoning. And in my correspondence I am told that another of my dearest
friends has only a year to live; that another heroic man is a nervous wreck,
craving for death; and that a third is tortured by bilious headaches.1 And
there is not one of these people whom I could not cure if I had him alone for
a couple of weeks; no one of them who would not in the end be walking
down the street "as if it were such fun!"
I propose herein to tell the story of my discovery of health, and I shall not
waste much time in apologizing for the intimate nature of the narrative. It is
no pleasure for me to tell over the tale of my headaches or to discuss my
unruly stomach. I cannot take any case but my own, because there is no
case about which I can speak with such authority. To be sure, I might write
about it in the abstract, and in veiled terms. But in that case the story would
lose most of its convincingness, and so of its usefulness. I might tell it
without signing my name to it. But there are a great many people who have
read my books and will believe what I tell them, who would not take the
trouble to read an article without a name. Mr. Horace Fletcher has set us all
an example in this matter. He has written several volumes about his
individual digestion, with the result that literally millions of people have
been helped. In the same way I propose to put my case on record. The
reader will find that it is a typical case, for I made about every mistake that
a man could make, and tried every remedy, old and new, that anybody had
to offer me.
I spent my boyhood in a well-to-do family, in which good eating was
regarded as a social grace and the principal interest in life. We had a colored
woman to prepare our food, and another to serve it. It was not considered
fitting for children to drink liquor, but they had hot bread three times a day,
and they were permitted to revel in fried chicken and rich gravies and
pastries, fruit cake and candy and ice-cream. Every Sunday I would see my
grandfather's table with a roast of beef at one end, and a couple of chickens
at the other, and a cold ham at one side; at Christmas and Thanksgiving the
energies of the whole establishment would be given up to the preparation of
delicious foods. And later on, when I came to New York, I considered it
necessary to have such food; even when I was a poor student, living on four
dollars a week, I spent more than three of it on eatables.
I was an active and fairly healthy boy; at twenty I remember saying that I
had not had a day's serious sickness in fourteen years. Then I wrote my first
novel, working sixteen or eighteen hours a day for several months, camping
out, and living mostly out of a frying-pan. At the end I found that I was
seriously troubled with dyspepsia; and it was worse the next year, after the
second book. I went to see a physician, who gave me some red liquid,
which magically relieved the consequences of doing hard brain-work after
eating. So I went on for a year or two more, and then I found that the
artificially digested food was not being eliminated from my system with
sufficient regularity. So I went to another physician, who gave my malady
another name, and gave me another medicine, and put off the time of
reckoning a little while longer.
I have never in my life used tea or coffee, alcohol or tobacco; but for
seven or eight years I worked under heavy pressure all the time, and ate
very irregularly, and ate unwholesome food. So I began to have headaches
once in a while, and to notice that I was abnormally sensitive to colds. I
considered these maladies natural to mortals, and I would always attribute
them to some specific accident. I would say, "I've been knocking about
down town all day"; or, "I was out in the hot sun"; or, "I lay on the damp
ground." I found that if I sat in a draught for even a minute I was certain to
"catch a cold." I found also that I had sore throat and tonsilitis once or twice
every winter; also, now and then, the grippe. There were times when I did
not sleep well; and as all this got worse, I would have to drop all my work
and try to rest. The first time I did this a week or two was sufficient; but
later on a month or two was necessary, and then several months.
The year I wrote "The Jungle" I had my first summer cold. It was haying
time on a farm, and I thought it was a kind of hay-fever. I would sneeze for
hours in perfect torment, and this lasted for a month, until I went away to
the sea-shore. This happened again the next summer, and also another very
painful experience; a nerve in a tooth died, and I had to wait three days for
the pain to "localize," and then had the tooth drilled out, and staggered
home, and was ill in bed for a week with chills and fever, and nausea and
terrible headaches. I mention all these unpleasant details so that the reader
may understand the state of wretchedness to which I had come. At the same
time, also, I had a great deal of distressing illness in my family; my wife
seldom had a week without suffering, and my little boy had pneumonia one
winter, and croup the next, and whooping-cough in the summer, with the
inevitable "colds" scattered in between.
After the Helicon Hall fire I realized that I was in a bad way, and for the
two years following I gave a good part of my time to trying to find out how
to preserve my health. I went to Battle Creek, and to Bermuda, and to the
Adirondacks; I read the books of all the new investigators of the subject of
hygiene, and tried out their theories religiously. I had discovered Horace
Fletcher a couple of years before. Mr. Fletcher's idea is, in brief, to chew
your food, and chew it thoroughly; to extract from each particle of food the
maximum of nutriment, and to eat only as much as your system actually
needs. This was a very wonderful idea to me, and I fell upon it with the
greatest enthusiasm. All the physicians I had known were men who tried to
cure me when I fell sick, but here was a man who was studying how to stay
well. I have to find fault with Mr. Fletcher's system, and so I must make
clear at the outset how much I owe to it. It set me upon the right track—it
showed me the goal, even if it did not lead me to it. It made clear to me that
all my various ailments were symptoms of one great trouble, the presence in
my body of the poisons produced by superfluous and unassimilated food,
and that in adjusting the quantity of food to the body's exact needs lay the
secret of perfect health.
It was only in the working out of the theory that I fell down. Mr. Fletcher
told me that "Nature" would be my guide, and that if only I masticated
thoroughly, instinct would select the foods. I found that, so far as my case
was concerned, my "nature" was hopelessly perverted. I invariably
preferred unwholesome foods—apple pie, and toast soaked in butter, and
stewed fruit with quantities of cream and sugar. Nor did "Nature" kindly tell
me when to stop, as she apparently does some other "Fletcherites"; no
matter how much I chewed, if I ate all I wanted I ate too much. And when I
realized this, and tried to stop it, I went, in my ignorance, to the other
extreme, and lost fourteen pounds in as many days. Again, Mr. Fletcher
taught me to remove all the "unchewable" parts of the food—the skins of
fruit, etc. The result of this is there is nothing to stimulate the intestines, and
the waste remains in the body for many days. Mr. Fletcher says this does
not matter, and he appears to prove that it has not mattered in his case. But I
found that it mattered very seriously in my case; it was not until I became a
"Fletcherite" that my headaches became hopeless and that sluggish
intestines became one of my chronic complaints.
I next read the books of Metchnikoff and Chittenden, who showed me just
how my ailments came to be. The unassimilated food lies in the colon, and
bacteria swarm in it, and the poisons they produce are absorbed into the
system. I had bacteriological examinations made in my own case, and I
found that when I was feeling well the number of these toxin-producing
germs was about six billions to the ounce of intestinal contents; and when, a
few days later, I had a headache, the number was a hundred and twenty
billions. Here was my trouble under the microscope, so to speak.
These tests were made at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, where I went for a
long stay. I tried their system of water cure, which I found a wonderful
stimulant to the eliminative organs; but I discovered that, like all other
stimulants, it leaves you in the end just where you were. My health was
improved at the sanitarium, but a week after I left I was down with the
grippe again.
I gave the next year of my life to trying to restore my health. I spent the
winter in Bermuda and the summer in the Adirondacks, both of them
famous health resorts, and during the entire time I lived an absolutely
hygienic life. I did not work hard, and I did not worry, and I did not think
about my health except when I had to. I lived in the open air all the time,
and I gave most of the day to vigorous exercise—tennis, walking, boating
and swimming. I mention this specifically, so that the reader may perceive
that I had eliminated all other factors of ill-health, and appreciate to the full
my statement that at the end of the year's time my general health was worse
than ever before.
I was all right so long as I played tennis all day or climbed mountains.
The trouble came when I settled down to do brain-work. And from this I
saw perfectly clearly that I was over-eating; there was surplus food to be
burned up, and when it was not burned up it poisoned me. But how was I to
stop when I was hungry? I tried giving up all the things I liked and of which
I ate most; but that did no good, because I had such a complacent appetite—
I would immediately take to liking the other things! I thought that I had an
abnormal appetite, the result of my early training; but how was I ever to get
rid of it?
I must not give the impression that I was a conspicuously hearty eater. On
the contrary, I ate far less than most people eat. But that was no consolation
to me. I had wrecked myself by years of overwork, and so I was more
sensitive. The other people were going to pieces by slow stages, I could see;
but I was already in pieces.
So matters stood when I chanced to meet a lady, whose radiant
complexion and extraordinary health were a matter of remark to everyone. I
was surprised to hear that for ten or fifteen years, and until quite recently,
she had been a bed-ridden invalid. She had lived the lonely existence of a
pioneer's wife, and had raised a family under conditions of shocking ill-
health. She had suffered from sciatica and acute rheumatism; from a chronic
intestinal trouble which the doctors called "intermittent peritonitis"; from
intense nervous weakness, melancholy, and chronic catarrh, causing
deafness. And this was the woman who rode on horseback with me up
Mount Hamilton, in California, a distance of twenty-eight miles, in one of
the most terrific rain-storms I have ever witnessed! We had two untamed
young horses, and only leather bits to control them with, and we were
pounded and flung about for six mortal hours, which I shall never forget if I
live to be a hundred. And this woman, when she took the ride, had not eaten
a particle of food for four days previously!
That was the clue to her escape: she had cured herself by a fast. She had
abstained from food for eight days, and all her troubles had fallen from her.
Afterwards she had taken her eldest son, a senior at Stanford, and another
friend of his, and fasted twelve days with them, and cured them of nervous
dyspepsia. And then she had taken a woman friend, the wife of a Stanford
professor, and cured her of rheumatism by a week's fast. I had heard of the
fasting cure, but this was the first time I had met with it. I was too much
burdened with work to try it just then, but I began to read up on the subject
—the books of Dr. Dewey, Dr. Hazzard and Mr. Carrington. Coming home
from California I got a sunstroke on the Gulf of Mexico, and spent a week
in hospital at Key West, and that seemed to give the coup de grace to my
long-suffering stomach. After another spell of hard work I found myself
unable to digest corn-meal mush and milk; and so I was ready for a fast.
I began. The fast has become a commonplace to me now; but I will
assume that it is as new and as startling to the reader as it was to myself at
first, and will describe my sensations at length.
I was very hungry for the first day—the unwholesome, ravening sort of
hunger that all dyspeptics know. I had a little hunger the second morning,
and thereafter, to my very great astonishment, no hunger whatever—no
more interest in food than if I had never known the taste of it. Previous to
the fast I had had a headache every day for two or three weeks. It lasted
through the first day and then disappeared—never to return. I felt very weak
the second day, and a little dizzy on arising. I went out of doors and lay in
the sun all day, reading; and the same for the third and fourth days—intense
physical lassitude, but with great clearness of mind. After the fifth day I felt
stronger, and walked a good deal, and I also began some writing. No phase
of the experience surprised me more than the activity of my mind: I read
and wrote more than I had dared to do for years before.
During the first four days I lost fifteen pounds in weight—something
which, I have since learned, was a sign of the extremely poor state of my
tissues. Thereafter I lost only two pounds in eight days—an equally unusual
phenomenon. I slept well throughout the fast. About the middle of each day
I would feel weak, but a massage and a cold shower would refresh me.
Towards the end I began to find that in walking about I would grow tired in
the legs, and as I did not wish to lie in bed I broke the fast after the twelfth
day with some orange-juice.
I took the juice of a dozen oranges during two days, and then went on the
milk diet, as recommended by Bernarr Macfadden. I took a glassful of
warm milk every hour the first day, every three-quarters of an hour the next
day, and finally every half-hour—or eight quarts a day. This is, of course,
much more than can be assimilated, but the balance serves to flush the
system out. The tissues are bathed in nutriment, and an extraordinary
recuperation is experienced. In my own case I gained four and a half
pounds in one day—the third—and gained a total of thirty-two pounds in
twenty-four days.
My sensations on this milk diet were almost as interesting as on the fast.
In the first place, there was an extraordinary sense of peace and calm, as if
every weary nerve in the body were purring like a cat under a stove. Next
there was the keenest activity of mind—I read and wrote incessantly. And,
finally, there was a perfectly ravenous desire for physical work. In the old
days I had walked long distances and climbed mountains, but always with
reluctance and from a sense of compulsion. Now, after the cleaning-out of
the fast, I would go into a gymnasium and do work which would literally
have broken my back before, and I did it with intense enjoyment, and with
amazing results. The muscles fairly leaped out upon my body; I suddenly
discovered the possibility of becoming an athlete. I had always been lean
and dyspeptic-looking, with what my friends called a "spiritual" expression;
I now became as round as a butter-ball, and so brown and rosy in the face
that I was a joke to all who saw me.
I had not taken what is called a "complete" fast—that is, I had not waited
until hunger returned. Therefore I began again. I intended only a short fast,
but I found that hunger ceased again, and, much to my surprise, I had none
of the former weakness. I took a cold bath and a vigorous rub twice a day; I
walked four miles every morning, and did light gymnasium work, and with
nothing save a slight tendency to chilliness to let me know that I was
fasting. I lost nine pounds in eight days, and then went for a week longer on
oranges and figs, and made up most of the weight on these.
I shall always remember with amusement the anxious caution with which
I now began to taste the various foods which before had caused me trouble.
Bananas, acid fruits, peanut butter—I tried them one by one, and then in
combination, and so realized with a thrill of exultation that every trace of
my old trouble was gone. Formerly I had had to lie down for an hour or two
after meals; now I could do whatever I chose. Formerly I had been
dependent upon all kinds of laxative preparations; now I forgot about them.
I no longer had headaches. I went bareheaded in the rain, I sat in cold
draughts of air, and was apparently immune to colds. And, above all, I had
that marvellous, abounding energy, so that whenever I had a spare minute or
two I would begin to stand on my head, or to "chin" myself, or do some
other "stunt," from sheer exuberance of animal spirits.
For several months after this experience I lived upon a diet of raw foods
exclusively—mainly nuts and fruits. I had been led to regard this as the
natural diet for human beings; and I found that so long as I was leading an
active life the results were most satisfactory. They were satisfactory also in
the case of my wife, and still more so in the case of my little boy; the
amount of work and bother thus saved in the household may be imagined.
But when I came to settle down to a long period of hard and continuous
writing, I found that I had not sufficient bodily energy to digest these raw
foods. I resorted to fasting and milk alternately—and that is well enough for
a time, but it proves a nervous strain in the end. Recently a friend called my
attention to the late Dr. Salisbury's book, "The Relation of Alimentation to
Disease." Dr. Salisbury recommends a diet of broiled beef and hot water as
the solution of most of the problems of the human body; and it may be
believed that I, who had been a rigid and enthusiastic vegetarian for three or
four years, found this a startling idea. However, I make a specialty of
keeping an open mind, and I set out to try the Salisbury system. I am sorry
to have to say that it seems to be a good one; sorry, because the vegetarian
way of life is so obviously the cleaner and more humane and more
convenient. But it seems to me that I am able to do more work and harder
work with my mind while eating beefsteaks than under any other régime;
and while this continues to be the case there will be one less vegetarian in
the world.
The fast is to me the key to eternal youth, the secret of perfect and
permanent health. I would not take anything in all the world for my
knowledge of it. It is Nature's safety-valve, an automatic protection against
disease. I do not venture to assert that I am proof against virulent diseases,
such as smallpox or typhoid. I know one ardent physical culturist, a
physician, who takes typhoid germs at intervals in order to prove his
immunity, but I should not care to go that far; it is enough for me to know
that I am proof against all the common infections which plague us, and
against all the "chronic" troubles. And I shall continue so just as long as I
stand by my present resolve, which is to fast at the slightest hint of any
symptom of ill-being—a cold or a headache, a feeling of depression, or a
coated tongue, or a scratch on the finger which does not heal quickly.
Those who have made a study of the fast explain its miracles in the
following way: Superfluous nutriment is taken into the system and
ferments, and the body is filled with a greater quantity of poisonous matter
than the organs of elimination can handle. The result is the clogging of
these organs and of the blood-vessels—such is the meaning of headaches
and rheumatism, arteriosclerosis, paralysis, apoplexy, Bright's disease,
cirrhosis, etc. And by impairing the blood and lowering the vitality, this
same condition prepares the system for infection—for "colds," or
pneumonia, or tuberculosis, or any of the fevers. As soon as the fast begins,
and the first hunger has been withstood, the secretions cease, and the whole
assimilative system, which takes so much of the energies of the body, goes
out of business. The body then begins a sort of house-cleaning, which must
be helped by an enema and a bath daily, and, above all, by copious water-
drinking. The tongue becomes coated, the breath and the perspiration
offensive; and this continues until the diseased matter has been entirely cast
out, when the tongue clears and hunger reasserts itself in unmistakable
form.
The loss of weight during the fast is generally about a pound a day. The
fat is used first, and after that the muscular tissue; true starvation begins
only when the body has been reduced to the skeleton and the viscera. Fasts
of forty and fifty days are now quite common—I have met several who
have taken them.
 Strange as it may seem, the fast is a cure for both emaciation and obesity.
After a complete fast the body will come to its ideal weight. People who are
very stout will not regain their weight; while people who are under weight
may gain a pound or more a day for a month. There are two dangers to be
feared in fasting. The first is that of fear. I do not say this as a jest. No one
should begin to fast until he has read up on the subject and convinced
himself that it is the thing to do; if possible he should have with him
someone who has already had the experience. He should not have about
him terrified aunts and cousins who will tell him that he looks like a corpse,
that his pulse is below forty, and that his heart may stop beating in the night.
I took a fast of three days out in California; on the third day I walked about
fifteen miles, off and on, and, except that I was restless, I never felt better.
And then in the evening I came home and read about the Messina
earthquake, and how the relief ships arrived, and the wretched survivors
crowded down to the water's edge and tore each other like wild beasts in
their rage of hunger. The paper set forth, in horrified language, that some of
them had been seventy-two hours without food. I, as I read, had also been
seventy-two hours without food; and the difference was simply that they
thought they were starving. And if at some crisis during a long fast, when
you feel nervous and weak and doubting, some people with stronger wills
than your own are able to arouse in you the terrors of the earthquake
survivors, they can cause their most direful anticipations to be realized.
The other danger is in breaking the fast. A person breaking a long fast
should regard himself as if he were liable to seizures of violent insanity. I
know a man who fasted fifty days, and then ate half a dozen figs, and
caused intestinal abrasions from which he lost a great deal of blood. I would
dwell more upon this topic were it not for my discovery of the "milk diet."
When you drink a glass of milk every half-hour you have no chance to get
really hungry, and so you glide, as if by magic, from a condition of extreme
emaciation to one of blooming rotundity. But very frequently the milk diet
disagrees with people; and these have to break the fast with very small
quantities of the simplest foods—fruit juices and meat broths for the first
two or three days at least.
I will conclude this chapter by narrating the experiences of some other
persons with the fasting cure. With the exception of one, the second case,
they are all people whom I know personally, and who have told me their
stories with their own lips.
 First, I give the case of my wife. She has always been frail, and subject to
sore throats since girlhood. In the past five years she has undergone three
major surgical operations and had several serious illnesses besides. Two
years ago she had a severe attack of appendicitis. The physician made a
wrong diagnosis, and kept her alive for about ten days with morphine. She
was then too low to risk an operation, and was not expected to live. It was
several months before she was able to walk again, and she had never fully
recovered from the experience. When she began the fast she was suffering
from serious stomach trouble, loss of weight, and neurasthenia.
I did not think that she would be able to stand a fast. She had more trouble
than I—some nervousness, headache and nausea. But she stood it for ten
days, when her tongue cleared suddenly. She had lost twelve pounds, and
she then gained twenty-two pounds in seventeen days. She then took
another fast of six days with me, and with no more trouble than I
experienced the second time—walking four miles every morning with me.
She is now a picture of health, and is engaged in accumulating muscle with
enthusiasm.
Second, a man well on in life, who had always abused his health. He
suffered from asthma and dropsy, and was saturated with drugs. He had not
been able to lie down for several years. He weighed over 220 pounds, and
his legs were "like sacks of water, leaking continually." His kidneys had
refused to act, and after his doctors had tried all the drugs they knew, he
was told that he was dying. His brother, who narrated the circumstances to
me, persuaded him not to eat the supper that was brought in to him, and so
he lived through the night. He fasted seven days, and went for four weeks
longer on a very light diet, and is now chopping wood and pitching hay
upon his farm in Kentucky.
Third, a young physician, as a college boy a physical wreck from
dissipation, now twenty-four. "A born neurastheniac." He was attacked by
appendicitis twice in succession. He fasted five days after the last attack,
and six days later on. Gained thirty-five pounds, and is a splendidly
developed athlete; he runs five miles in 26 minutes 15 seconds, and rode a
wheel 500 miles in seven days.
Fourth, a young lady, who had suffered a nervous collapse caused by
overwork and worry. The bones of her spine had softened; her hip-bones
tilted upwards three-quarters of an inch; she was "barely able to crawl on
two sticks." She fasted ten days, and again eight days, and took the milk