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DR. DEWEY'S BOOKS.

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[Illustration: (signed) E. H. Dewey.]




THE

NO-BREAKFAST PLAN

AND

THE FASTING-CURE.

BY

EDWARD HOOKER DEWEY, M. D.



MEADVILLE, PA., U. S. A.:
PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR.
1900.




COPYRIGHT, 1900,
BY EDWARD HOOKER DEWEY.

REGISTERED AT STATIONERS' HALL, LONDON, ENGLAND.

_All Rights Reserved._




TO

GEORGE S. KEITH, M.D., LL.D., F.R.C.P.E., SCOTLAND,

A. RABAGLIATI, M.A., M.D., F.R.C.P., EDINBURGH,

AND

ALEXANDER HAIG, M.A., M.D., OXON., F.R.C.P., LONDON, ENGLAND,

WHO HAVE COMMENDED THE WRITINGS OF THE AUTHOR IN THEIR
OWN PUBLISHED WORKS,

THIS BOOK IS

GRATEFULLY DEDICATED.




PREFACE.


This volume is a history, or a story, of an evolution in the
professional care of the sick. It begins in inexperience and in a haze
of medical superstition, and ends with a faith that Nature is the all in
all in the cure of disease. The hygiene unfolded is both original and
revolutionary: its practicality is of the largest, and its physiology
beyond any possible question. The reader is assured in advance that
every line of this volume has been written with conviction at white
heat, that enforced food in sickness and the drug that corrodes are
professional barbarisms unworthy of the times in which we live.

E. H. DEWEY.

    MEADVILLE, PA., U. S. A.,
        _November, 1900_.




CONTENTS.


THE NO-BREAKFAST PLAN.

I.

                                                                    PAGE

Introduction--Army experiences in the Civil War--Early years in
  general practice--Difficulties encountered--Medicinal treatment
  found wanting as a means to superior professional success           13

II.

A case of typhoid fever that revolutionized the Author's faith
  and practice--A cure without drugs, without food--Resulting
  studies of Nature in disease--Illustrative cases--A crucial
  experience in a case of diphtheria in the Author's family           26


III.

A study of the brain from a new point of view--Some new
  physiology evolved illustrated by severe cases of acute disease     34

IV.

The error of enforced food in cases of severe injuries and diseases
  illustrated by several striking examples                            42

V.

An apostrophe to physicians                                           56

VI.

The origin of the No-breakfast Plan--Personal experience of the
  Author as a dyspeptic--His first experience without a
  breakfast--Physiological questions considered--A new theory of
  the origin and development of disease and its cure--The spread of
  the No-breakfast Plan--Interesting cases                            60

VII.

Digestive conditions--Taste relish--Hunger relish--The moral
  science involved in digestion as a new study--Cheer as a
  digestive power--Its contagiousness--The need of higher life in
  the home as a matter of better health--Cheer as a duty              81

VIII.

The No-breakfast Plan among farmers and other laborers--A series
  of voluntary letters to an eminent divine, and the writer put
  down as a crank--The origin of the Author's first book--How the
  eminent Rev. Dr. George N. Pentecost was secured to write the
  introduction--His no-breakfast experience--The publisher converts
  a prominent editor--The case of Rev. W. E. Rambo, a returned
  missionary--The publishers' missionary work among missionaries--
  The utility of the morning fast--Its unquestionable physiology--
  Why the hardest labor is more easily performed and for more hours
  without a breakfast                                                 85

IX.

The utility of slow eating and thorough mastication unusually
  illustrated by Mr. Horace Fletcher, the author--What should we
  eat?--The use of fruit from a physiological standpoint             105

X.

Landscape-gardening upon the human face--A pen-picture--
  Unrecognized suicide--Absurdity of the use of drugs to cure
  diseases--A case of blood-letting--Mission of homoeopathy--
  Predigested foods                                                  110


THE FASTING-CURE.

XI.

The forty-two day fast of Mr. W. W. C. Cowen, of Warrensburg,
  Ill., and its successful end--Press account--The twenty-eight day
  fast of Mr. Milton Rathbun, of New York, and its successful
  end--Press account--A second fast of Mr. Milton Rathbun, of
  thirty-five days, in the interest of science, and its successful
  end--Press account--Adverse comments of Dr. George N. Shrady, an
  eminent New York physician                                         117

XII.

The remarkable fast of forty-five days of Miss Estella Kuenzel,
  of Philadelphia, resulting in a complete cure of a case of
  melancholia--Press accounts--A still more remarkable fast, of
  fifty days, of Mr. Leonard Thress, of Philadelphia, resulting in
  a complete cure of a bad case of general dropsy--Press
  accounts--General dropsy in a woman of seventy-six relieved by a
  fifteen-day fast, with the cure permanent--Rev. Dalrymple's fast
  of thirty-nine and one-half days without interruption of pastoral
  duties                                                             136

XIII.

Insanity--A study from a new point of view--Its radical cure
  deemed probable in most cases by protracted fasts--Feeding the
  insane as practised in the hospitals sharply criticised--Some
  direct words to physicians in charge                               157

XIV.

The evolution of obesity, and its easy relief by fasting--
  Overweight prevented by a limitation of the daily food
  and without lessening any of the powers or energies--The
  evolution and prevention of apoplexy                               177

XV.

Chronic alcoholism--The evolution of the drunkard--His complete,
  easy, rational cure by fasting--No case so grave as to be beyond
  cure by this means--Asthma; Its cure through dietary means--A
  railroad tragedy--The need of railroad men to save their brains
  from needless waste of energy in their stomachs--An illustrative
  case--Some of the Author's troubles from the ignorance of the
  people--The death of Mrs. Myers, of Philadelphia, on the
  thirty-fifth day of her fast--Adverse press accounts and
  comments--Adverse comments of Prof. H. C. Wood, M. D., L. L. D.,
  on fasting and fasters                                             183

XVI.

A successful sixty-day fast under the Author's care--More about
  predigested foods--Bathing from a physiological standpoint--The
  error of drinking water without thirst--Some earnest words to the
  mothers of this land--What the No-breakfast Plan means for them
  and their children--Concluding words                               199




ILLUSTRATIONS.


PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR                                    _Frontispiece._

MRS. A. M. LICHTENHAHN, THIRTY-SIXTH DAY
    WITHOUT FOOD                                          Opposite p. 54

REV. GEORGE SHERMAN RICHARDS                                  "       94

MRS. E. A. QUIGGLE                                            "      104

MR. MILTON RATHBUN SHORTLY AFTER HIS FAST                     "      132

MISS E. F. KUENZEL, FORTY-FIRST DAY OF FAST                   "      146

MR. LEONARD THRESS, FIFTIETH DAY OF FAST                      "      152

MISS E. W. A. WESTING, FORTIETH DAY OF FAST                   "      154




THE NO-BREAKFAST PLAN.




I.


A hygiene that claims to be new and of the greatest practicality, and
certainly revolutionary in its application, would seem to require
something of its origin and development to excite the interest of the
intelligent reader. Methods in health culture are about as numerous as
the individuals who find some method necessary for the health: taking
something, doing something for the health is the burden of lives almost
innumerable. Very few people are so well that some improvement is not
desirable.

The literature on what to eat and not to eat, what to do and not to do,
on medicines that convert human stomachs into drug-stores, is simply
boundless. If we believe all we read, we must consider the location we
are in before we can safely draw the breath of life; we must not cool
our parched throats without the certificate of the microscope. We must
not eat without an ultimate analysis of each item of the bill of fare,
as we would take an account of stock before ordering fresh goods; and
this without ever knowing how much lime we need for the bones, iron for
the blood, phosphorus for the brain, or nitrogen for the muscles. In
short, there is death in the air we breathe, death in the food we eat,
death in the water we drink, until, verily, we seem to walk our ways of
life in the very valley and shadow of death, ever subject to the attack
of hobgoblins of disease.

How many lives would go down in despair but for the miracles of cure
promised in the public prints, even in our best journals and monthlies,
we cannot know. It is the hope for better things that sustains our
lives; suicide never occurs until all hope has departed. Even our
medical journals are heavily padded with pages of new remedies whose use
involves the most amazing credulity. Perhaps it is well, in the absence
of a sound physiological hygiene, that the people who are sick and
afflicted shall be buoyed up by fresh, printed promises. Perhaps it is
also well for the physician to be able to go into the rooms of the sick
inspired from the advertising pages of his favorite medical journals.

Are they not new stars of hope to both physician and the people? Why
should we not hope when new remedies are multiplying in such infinite
excess over newly discovered diseases? _New diseases?_ What is there
essentially new that can be treated with remedies, in the coated
tongues, foul mouths, high temperature and pulse, pain, discomfort, and
acute aversion to food, that is to be found in the rooms of the sick?
Are there really specifics for these conditions?

The hygiene to be unfolded in these pages is so new, so revolutionary,
that its first impress has never failed to excite every form of
opposition known to language, and yet its practicality is so great that
it is rarely questioned by those who fairly test it. It has not been
found wanting in its physiology, nor has it failed to grow wherever it
has found lodgement.

The origin and development of this new way in health culture seem to
require something of professional autobiography, that it may be seen
that it is a matter of evolution and not of chance, not a fad that has
only its passing hour.

After receiving my medical degree from the University of Michigan, and
serving a term as house physician to the U. S. Marine Hospital at
Detroit, Michigan, I entered one of the large army hospitals at
Chattanooga, Tenn., at the beginning of the Sherman campaign in Georgia,
where I found a ward of eighty sick and wounded soldiers fresh from the
battle of Resacea. My professional fitness for duties so grave and so
large in extent was of a very questionable order, and I did not in the
least overestimate it.

It had not escaped my notice, even before I began the study of medicine,
that whether disease were coaxed with doses too small for mathematical
estimate, or whether blown out with solid shot or blown up with shells,
the percentage of recoveries seemed to be about the same regardless of
the form of treatment.

I was reared in a large family in a country home, several miles from a
physician, where all but the severest sicknesses were treated with
herb-tea dosage, and this was true of all other country homes. With all
this in mind I had begun the study of medicine with a good deal less
than the average faith in the utility of dosage, and it was not enlarged
by my professor of materia medica.

I entered upon my serious duties as did good, rare, old Bunyan into his
pulpit, with a feeling fairly oppressive that I was "the least of all
the saints." My materia medica was in my vest pocket; my small library
in my head, with its contents in a very hazy condition. With a weak
memory for details, and marked inability to possess truth except by the
slow process of digestion and assimilation, my brain was more a
machine-shop than a wareroom; hence capacity of retail dealing was of
the smallest. I was not in the least conscious at this time that a large
wareroom amply stored by virtue of a retentive memory was not the most
needed as an equipment for all the practical affairs of life. I have
ever found it necessary to dodge some memories, when there was lack of
time to endure a hailstorm of details.

That I did not become a danger to the hapless sick and wounded only less
than their diseases and wounds, was wholly due to my small materia
medica, to utter lack of pride in knowledge that had not become a power
with me, and to that lofty ambition for professional success which moved
me to seize aid from no matter where or whom, as the drowning man a
straw.

It was my great professional fortune that the medical staff of this
hospital of more than a thousand cots was of a very high order of
ability and experience, and that I entered at the beginning of a
campaign in which for more than three months there was a fitful roar of
artillery and rattle of musketry every day; hence a continuous influx to
cots vacated by deaths or recoveries.

In all respects it was the best equipped hospital for professional
experience of any that I knew anything about. There was one rigid rule
that I believe was not carried out in any other hospital: post-mortems
in all cases, numbering from one to a dozen daily, and all made with a
thoroughness I have never seen in private practice.

The features of my hospital service that impressed me most were the
post-mortem revelations and the diverse treatments for the same disease.
I soon found that, no matter what the disease, every surgeon was a law
to himself as to the quality, quantity, and times of his doses, with the
mortality in the wards apparently about the same.

Post-mortem examinations often revealed chronic diseases whose existence
could not have been suspected during life, and yet had made death
inevitable.

Another advantage in army hospital practice was the stability of the
position and the absence of the harassing anxiety of friends, thus
affording the highest possibilities of the judgment and reason. And
still another advantage was the high social relations existing between
the medical officers, due to the absence of all causes for jealousy,
neither the position nor salary depending on superior endowments or
professional success.

I was aware that, in spite of my lack of experience and the presence of
a most painful sense of general insufficiency, my sick and wounded were
about as safe in my hands from professional harm, even from the first,
as the patients of the most experienced medical officer in the hospital.

With high professional ideals, with no ability to make use of hazy
conceptions or ideas, having no pride in knowledge that had not become
my own, I began at once to reinforce myself from the experience and
wisdom of my brother officers, whose advisory services were always
readily and kindly rendered.

From the first and all through my military service my severely sick had
the advantage of all the borrowed skill and experience I could command.
As for surgical operations, they were all performed in the presence of
most of the medical staff, some of whom were of great experience.

The surgery of the army hospitals of 1864 was of the highest character
in skill and in careful attention to all the details involved, and the
fatalities were generally due to the gravity of the wounds requiring
operations and lack of constitutional power for recovery, rather than to
the absence of the germ-killer. At that time the microbe was not a
factor in the probabilities of life or death. In all else the care of
the wounds could hardly be surpassed.

As for the medicinal treatment of my sick, it was unsatisfactory from
first to last. After all the years since I cannot believe that, except
for the relief of pain, any patient was made better by my dosage; and in
all fatalities the post-mortem revealed the fact that the wisest dosage
would have been without avail.

But in the study of the history of disease as revealed by symptoms my
hospital experience was invaluable. I have since found that my greatest
service at the beds of the sick is as an interpreter of symptoms rather
than a vender of drugs. The friends of the sick read indications for
good or bad with wonderful acuteness, as a rule; and I have rarely found
myself mistaken in my ability to read the condition of patients in the
faces of the friends, even before I enter the rooms of the sick.

As my experience enlarged so did my faith in Nature; and, since there
was no similarity in the quality, sizes, and times of the doses for like
diseases, my faith in mere remedies gradually declined.

After a year and a half of large opportunities to study the diseases of
men in the early prime of life, in the care of the simple surgery of
shot and shell, I left the army with such familiarity with grave
diseases and death in various forms as to enable me ever after to retain
complete self-possession in the presence of dying beds in private
practice.

I began the general practice of medicine in Meadville in the autumn of
1866. Among the many physicians located in the city at that time were
men of ability and large experience. There were those who administered
with sublime faith doses too small for mathematical estimate; those who
with equal faith administered boluses to the throat's capacity for
deglutition; those who fully believed in whiskey as nourishment, that
milk is liquid food, and who with tremendous faith and forceful hands
administered both until human stomachs were reduced to barren wastes and
death would result from starvation aggravated by disease.

Most of the cases of disease that fall to the care of the physician are
trivial, self-limited, and rapidly recover under even the most
crucifying dosages; Nature really winning the victories, the physician
carrying off the honors.

This is so nearly true that it may be stated that, aside from the domain
of surgery, professional success in the general sense depends upon the
personal qualities and character of the physician rather than the
achievements of the materia medica.

People have a confidence in the power of medicine to cure disease
scarcely less than the dusky warrior has in the Indian medicine-lodge of
the Western wilderness, and a confidence about as void of reason.

The physician goes into the rooms of the sick held to the severest
accountability in the matter of dosage; and the larger his own faith in
medicines the greater his task; and, if he is of my own, the so-called
"old school," or Allopathic, the more dangerous he is to the curing
efforts of Nature.

With the people the disease is simply an attack, and not the summing up
of the results of violated laws going on perhaps from birth. With the
people the symptoms are merely evidences of destruction, and not the
visible efforts to restore the normal condition. Hence the failures to
relieve always raise more or less questioning, among friends in painful
concern, as to the ability of the physician to discharge his grave
duties.

This unreasoning, unreasonable "blind faith" in remedial means is as
strong in the most intelligent as in the most ignorant, and it has ever
given me more trouble than the care of the sick. Another serious
complication of the sick-room arises from near-by friends who are very
certain that their own physicians are better fitted by far for the
serious work of prescribing for the sick.

In addition to the serious work of attacking the symptoms of disease as
so many foes to life, there is also a care as to what unbidden food
shall go into unbidden stomachs, that the system shall be supported
while life seems to be in the hands of its greatest enemy.

The universal conception of disease as a foe to life, and not as a
rational process of cure; the boundless faith in remedies as means to
resist the attack, revealed by symptoms, makes the professional care of
the sick the gravest of all human occupations, and the most trying to
both head and heart.

With all these taxing conditions confronting me, I opened an office in a
field which seemed to be more than occupied by men of large experience.

With all my army experience I still had a hazy conception as to Nature
in disease. That the vital forces needed the support of all the food the
stomach of the sick could dispose of, was not a question of the remotest
consideration. That medicine did in some way act to cure disease I could
not fully question.

I was now to enter a service in which, from the care of infancy in its
first breathings to old age in its last, every resource of the materia
medica, of the reason, judgment, and of the soul itself, was to be
called in in every grave case, and to be held to a responsibility
measured by preposterous faith in medicines.

I entered upon my duties with a determination to win professional
success by the most thorough attention to all the details of service
upon the sick and their friends, and I confined my efforts almost wholly
to acute cases. None of my professional colleagues were winning laurels
by the treatment of chronic diseases, and not having faith in drugs for
such I had my scruples about fees for failures that seemed inevitable.

And yet with the most painstaking service fortune would play with me at
times in the most heartless manner. At one time four of my adult
patients were awaiting burial within the radius of a half mile. As they
were all physical wrecks, and died after short illnesses, there could be
no question raised in any just sense as to the character of my services,
but the fatalities were scored against me. Such fortune would be
annihilating but for the fatalities inevitable with all practitioners.

For full ten years I visited the sick and dosed them according to the
books, but with far less force of hands and faith than any of my
brethren, and all were enjoined to take nourishment to keep up the
strength for the combat with disease.

My doses were confined to only a few Sampsons of the materia medica, and
these were administered with a watching for favorable results that could
hardly be surpassed, and yet always with disappointment.

I was innocent enough to believe that a large practice could only be
built up by the most painstaking and persistent effort; later on I found
that a large practice was but little dependent upon the skill and
learning displayed in the sick-room. One physician could immediately
secure a large patronage because she was a woman; another, because he
belonged to this or that nationality, or there was something in the
personal outfit rather than in the professional that incited large hopes
for the ailing.

In all my cases of acute sickness there was always a wasting of the body
no matter how much they were fed; a like increase of general strength
when a normal desire for food occurred no matter how little they were
fed. I saw this with eyesight only; but I saw with insight that a large
practice could be carried on by doctors too ignorant to know that there
was an alphabet in medical science.

I was not then so fully aware of the depths of ignorance among the
people as to what cures disease, did not know that faith in doses was so
large, as child-like even with the most cultured as with the ignorant. I
was not so well aware, as I became later, that the physician himself
must have such energy of faith in the materia medica as to reveal it in
every line of his countenance when in the rooms of the sick.

As the years went on, my faith in remedies did not increase; but I had
to dose to meet the superstitious needs of the people. My practice,
though far short of what it seemed to merit from the pains bestowed upon
it, was large enough for all the needs of profitable study had I been in
a condition for thought and reflection. It was not to my encouragement
that there were those doing a far larger business with doses simply
crucifying, and because crucifying, a far larger attendance was the
direct result.

I now see, as I did not then so clearly, that Nature's victories are
often won against the desperate odds of treatments that are simply
barbarous; and yet Nature is so powerful, so persistent in the attempts
to right all her wrongs, that she wins the victory in the great
majority of cases no matter how severely she may be taxed with means
that hinder. The great majority of the severely sick of a hundred years
ago recovered in spite of the bloody lancet and treatments that are the
barbarism of to-day.




II.


I was called one day to one of the families of the poorest of the poor,
where I found a sick case that for once in my life set me to thinking.
The patient was a sallow, overgrown girl in early maturity, with a
history of several months of digestive and other troubles. I found a
very sick patient, so sick that for a period of three weeks not even one
drink of water was retained, not one dose of medicine, and it was not
until several more days that water could be borne. When finally water
could be retained my patient seemed brighter in mind, the complexion was
clearer, and she seemed actually stronger. As for the tongue, which at
first was heavily coated, the improvement was striking; while the
breath, utterly foul at first, was strikingly less offensive. In every
way the patient was very much better.

I was so surprised at this that I determined at once to let the good
work go on on Nature's own terms, and so it did until about the
thirty-fifth day, when there was a call, not for the undertaker, but for
food, a call that marked the close of the disease. The pulse and
temperature had become normal, and there was a tongue as clean as the
tongue of a nursing infant.

Up to this time this was the most severely sick case I ever had that
recovered, and yet with not apparently more wasting of the body than
with other cases of as protracted sickness in which more or less food
was given and retained. And all this with only water for thirst until
hunger came and a _complete cure_!

Such ignoring of medical faith and practice, of the accumulated wisdom
and experience of all medical history, I had never seen before. Had the
patient been able to take both food and medicine, and I had prohibited,
and by chance death had occurred, I would have been held guilty of
actually putting the patient to death--death from starvation. Feed, feed
the sick whether or not, say all the doctors, say all the books, to
support strength or to keep life in the body, and yet Nature was absurd
enough to ignore all human practice evolved from experience, and in her
own way to support vital power while curing the disease.

I could recall a great many cases in which because of intense aversion
to food patients had been sick for many days, and even weeks, with not
enough nourishment taken to account for the support of vital power; but
the fact did not raise a question with me.

The effect of this case upon my mind was so profound that I began to
apply the same methods in Nature to other patients, and with the same
general results. The body, of course, would waste during the time of
sickness; but so did the bodies of sick that were fed. As for medicines,
they were utterly ignored except where pain was to be relieved, though
unmedicated doses were alike a necessity with all. Not a single
medicine was given except for pain, and occasionally in cases in which I
had reason to think the entire digestive tract needed a general clearing
of foul sewage. Thence on, that supreme work, the cure of disease, in my
hands became the work of Nature only.

In a general practice I was able to carry out the non-feeding plan by
permitting the various meat teas or the cereal broths, none of which can
be taken by the severely sick in quantities to do harm. By withholding
milk I was enabled to secure all the fasting Nature required, while
satisfying the ever-anxious friends with tea and broth diversions.

This was a line of investigation that I felt ought to be of the deepest
interest to every thinking, high-minded physician, to every intelligent
layman; and very early the evidences of the utility of withholding food
from the sick during the entire time of absence of desire for it, its
absolute safety, were beyond any questioning.

I had no fatalities that were apparently in any way due to the enforced
lack of food. In cases of chronic disease in which death was inevitable,
such as cancer, consumption, etc., patients were permitted to take what
they could with the least offence to the sense of relish. In every case
of recovery there was a history of increasing general strength as the
disease declined, of an actual increase of vital power without the
support of food that had no more relish than the dose that crucified
the nerves of taste.

In all America milk is the chief reliance to support vital power when no
other food can be taken. Milk in one stage of normal digestion gets into
the form of tough curds ready for the press, and curds should always be
thoroughly masticated before swallowing.

Sir William Roberts, of England, in his exhaustive work on _Digestion
and Diet_, asserts that milk-curds are not digested in the stomach
during sickness, but are forced into the duodenum, where, he asserts,
they are digested, but he gives no reason for his faith that there is
power to digest in the duodenum where there is none in the stomach.

It was not difficult to make the mothers in the homes understand that
taking milk by the drink was equivalent to swallowing green cheese-curds
without due mastication.

With these hygienic conceptions and methods I continued to visit the
sick as a mere witness of Nature's power in disease rather than as an
investigator, yet without being able to understand the secret of the
support of vital power without food. But whatever risk there might be,
or how strong my faith when my patrons were the subjects of what might
be called foolhardy experiments, there came a time when this faith was
to have the severest of all tests.

An epidemic of diphtheria broke out among my nearest neighbors, and
after four deaths in as many families within a stone's throw of my
residence a son of mine aged three years was taken. I had never given
him in all his life even a cross look, and whatever sin there was in
making idols of children in this I was the worst of all sinners, and I
did not quite believe, as some Christian folks would have me, that my
happiness through him was not the very incense of gratitude to the great
Author for the gift of such a treasure of the heart.

In my hour of trial two of my ablest and most experienced medical
friends came to me. Quinine and iron in solution were their verdict--and
the little throat was not copper-lined; and, in addition, all the strong
whiskey possible to force into the stomach: all this would have required
manacled wrists and the prying apart of set jaws. He had never received
anything from me more violent than caresses, and this abomination of
dosage was to be sent down a bleeding, ulcerated way, over raw surfaces
that would writhe and quiver under the added torture. This would not be
rational treatment for ulcerations on the body, and the loss of strength
through resistance and structural injury to the throat had no promise of
redemption except in the minds of my medical friends.

It happened that I left home without getting the prescription filled,
and, not getting back as soon as expected, the anxious wife procured the
medicines and succeeded in getting one dose into the stomach, and also
in raising a nervous hurricane that took an hour to allay. She was then
informed that such a dose would be cruel even to a horse. Thence on he
took nothing into his stomach but the water that thirst compelled, and a
little dosage with it to meet the mother's need; and so I stood beside
the suffering idol of my heart, with the entire medical world against
me--strong enough, only rejoicing in my strength to defend him against
the barbarism of authorized treatment. My only comfort was that in his
time of supreme need I could give him supreme kindness, and if death
must come there would not be the additional laceration of avoidable
cruelty inflicted; and Nature, with every possible aid that could add
comfort to the suffering body, won the victory.

Since then the medical world has advanced to antitoxin as a specific,
leaving me nearly alone to plodding ways that are by sight and not by
faith. That the treatment of my sick son in the absence of the only
supposed specific was in advance of my time, the medical world cannot
now question.

As the months and years went on, it so happened that all my fatalities
were of a character as not to involve in the least suggestions of
starvation, while the recoveries were a series of demonstrations as
clear as anything in mathematics, of evolving strength of all the
muscles, of all the senses and faculties, as the disease declined. No
physician whose practice has been extensive has failed to have had cases
in which the same changes occurred, and in which the amount of food
taken did not explain this general increase of strength.

Believing I had made a most important discovery in physiology, one that
would revolutionize the dietetic treatment of the sick, if not
ultimately abolish it, my visits to the sick became of unsurpassed
interest, I watched every possible change as an unfolding of new life,
seeing the physical changes only as I would see the swelling buds evolve
into the leaves or flowers, reading the soul- and mind-changes in the
more radiant lines of expression.

I saw all these things with the naked eye, and more and more marvelled
at the bulk of our materia medicas, the size of our drug-stores, and the
space given to healing powers in all public and medical prints.

For years I saw my patients grow into the strength of health without the
slightest clue to the mystery, until I chanced to open a new edition of
Yeo's _Physiology_ at the page where I found this table of the estimated
losses that occur in death after starvation:

    Fat             97 per cent.
    Muscle          30    "
    Liver           56    "
    Spleen          63    "
    Blood           17    "
    Nerve-centres    0

And light came as if the sun had suddenly appeared in the zenith at
midnight. Instantly I saw in human bodies a vast reserve of predigested
food, with the brain in possession of power so to absorb as to maintain
structural integrity in the absence of food or power to digest it. This
eliminated the brain entirely as an organ that needs to be fed or that
can be fed from light-diet kitchens in times of acute sickness. Only in
this self-feeding power of the brain is found the explanation of its
functional clearness where bodies have become skeletons.

I could now go into the rooms of the sick with a formula that explained
all the mysteries of the maintenance and support of vital power and cure
of disease, and that was of practical avail. I now knew that there could
be no death from starvation until the body was reduced to the skeleton
condition; that therefore for structural integrity, for functional
clearness, the brain has no need of food when disease has abolished the
desire for it. Is there any other way to explain the power to make wills
with whispering lips in the very hour of death, even in the last moments
of life, that the law recognizes as valid?

I could now know that to die of starvation is a matter not of days, but
of weeks and months; certainly a period far beyond the average time of
recovery from acute disease.




III.


There fell to my care a very much worn-out mother, who took to her bed
with an attack of inflammatory rheumatism, with the joints so involved
as to require the handling of a trained nurse. The agony was such that
the hypodermic needle was required to make existence endurable, and it
was used with the idea that the brain would be less injured by the
remedy than by the agony with its inevitable loss of sleep.

I know of no disease in which treatment has been more savage than in
this. The remedies in common use at that time were mainly new and of
supposed specific powers; but they were so violent, and proved to be so
futile, that they have all been given up since by the majority of the
profession.

As the days went on the disease declined in spite of the enforced
comfort through the needle; there were easier movements, a clearing of
the skin from sallow to a tint of redness, and finally, after a month,
the armchair could be used for a change.

On the morning of the forty-sixth day there was revealed in the face the
perfect color of health, and happiness marked every line of the
expression. There was ability to walk through several rooms of her home.
But it was not until the afternoon that the first food was desired and
taken, and never before was plain bread and butter, the supreme objects
of desire, so relished. In the following few months there was an actual
gain of forty pounds.

My next marked case is a wonderful illustration of the self-feeding
power of the brain to meet an emergency, and a revelation, also, of the
possible limitations of the starvation period. This was the case of a
frail, spare boy of four years, whose stomach was so disorganized by a
drink of solution of caustic potash that not even a swallow of water
could be retained. He died on the seventy-fifth day of his fast, with
the mind clear to the last hour, and with apparently nothing of the body
left but bones, ligaments, and a thin skin; and yet the brain had lost
neither weight nor functional clearness.

In another city a similar accident happened to a child of about the same
age, in whom it took three months for the brain to exhaust entirely the
available body-food.

I will now enter upon a study of the brain and its powers along these
lines, to be enlivened by illustrative evidence. What reason and
physiology had I with me that I should use methods in the sick-room
wherein the entire medical world was against me, and with severest
condemnation?

The head is the power-house of the human plant, with the brain the
dynamo as the source of every possible human energy. We think, love,
hate, admire, labor with our hands, taste, hear, smell, see, and feel
through the brain. Broken bones and wounds heal, diseases are cured
through energy evolved in the brain or the brain system as a whole. The
other so-called vital organs and the muscles are only as so many
machines that are run by the brain power, with the stomach an
exceedingly important machine. That powers so rare do not originate in
the bones, ligaments, muscles, or fats, does not need argument; that
when the nerve-trunks that supply the arm or leg are severed power of
movement and feeling is lost, is known to all; and equally would the
power of the stomach be abolished were the nerve-trunks cut off. In a
general way, then, it may be stated that the strength of the body is
directly as the strength of the brain.

With this physiology, who in or out of the medical profession can fail
to see clearly that the digestion of even an atom of food is a tax upon
the strength of the brain for whatever of power needed by the stomach,
the machine, for this purpose? Unless it can be proved that the stomach
has powers not derived from the brain system, this will have to be
admitted.

How is the strength kept up in the light of this physiology? The
universal belief is that it is kept up by the daily food. In proportion
to the prostration of sickness, so are physicians anxious to conserve
the energies by working the stomach to the limit of its powers.

The impression that there must be something digested to support the
vitality of the system is a belief, a conviction that has always been
too self-evident to suggest a doubt.

If the well need food to keep up the strength, the sick need it all the
more; this is the logic that has been displayed upon this question. Let
us keep it clear in mind that, if the nerves going to the stomach are
severed, paralysis will result as in the case of the arm, in order more
definitely to conceive the stomach as a _machine_ that requires power to
run it even to a tiringout degree. This is strikingly illustrated by the
exhausted feeling that invites the after-dinner nap for rest, which,
however, does not rest overfilled stomachs, overfilled brains. The brain
gets no rest while getting rid of food-masses with more of decomposition
than of digestion.

If food really has power to keep up the strength, there should not be so
much strength lost by the general activities--indeed, it would seem that
fatigue should be impossible. But the fact remains that from the first
wink in the morning to the last at night there is a gradual decline of
strength no matter how much food is taken, nor how ample the powers of
digestion; and that there comes a time with all when they must go to
bed, and not to the dining-room, to recover lost strength. The loss of a
night of sleep is never made up by any kind of care in eating on the
following day, and none are so stupid as not to know that rest is the
only means to recover from the exhaustion of excessive physical
activity.

The brain is not only a self-feeding organ when necessary, but it is
also a self-charging dynamo, regaining its exhausted energies entirely
through rest and sleep. There is no movement so light, no thought or
motion so trivial, that it does not cost brain power in its action--and
this is true of even the slightest exercise of energy evolved in
digestion.

Why, then, do we eat?

For two reasons, or perhaps three: we eat because we are hungry. We
rarely fail to eat excessively to satisfy the sense of relish after the
normal hunger sense has been dissipated; we may eat to satisfy relish as
we eat ice cream, fruits, and the enticing extras that beguile us to put
more food into the stomach after it is already overfilled for its
working capacity. But our actual need of food, the best reason for
taking it, is to make up for the wastes from the general activities; and
this is a process in the order of Nature that actually tires the entire
brain system, or, in the common phrase, the whole body, unless the
stomach has powers not derived from the brain system.

Now as we need not, cannot feed the brain in time of sickness, what can
we feed? In all diseases in which there are a high pulse and
temperature, pain or discomfort, aversion to food, a foul, dry mouth and
tongue, thirst, etc., wasting of the body goes on, no matter what the
feeding, until a clean, moist tongue and mouth and hunger mark the close
of the disease, when food can be taken with relish and digested. This
makes it clearly evident that we cannot save the muscles and fat by
feeding under these adverse conditions.

Another very important, unquestioned fact is that disease in proportion
to its severity means a loss of digestive conditions and of digestive
power.

Cheer is to digestion what the breeze is to the fire. It may well be
conceived that there are electric nerve wires extending from the depths
of the soul itself to each individual gland of the stomach, with the
highest cheer or ecstacy to stimulate the highest functional activity,
or the shock of bad news to paralyze. From cheer to despair, from the
slightest sense of discomfort to the agony of lacerated nerves,
digestive power goes down. Affected thus, digestive power wanes or
increases, goes down or up, as mercury in a barometer from weather
conditions.

Digestive conditions in their maximum are revealed in the school-yard
during recess, when Nature seems busy recovering lost time.

How compares the ramble of a June morning, with the blue and sunshine
all above, the matchless green of the trees, and all the air fragrant
with the perfume of flowers and alive with music from the winged singer,
in digestive conditions, with those in the rooms of the sick, where
there is only distress felt in the body and seen in the faces of the
friends?

In time of health, if we eat when we are not hungry, or when very tired,
or in any mental worriment, we find that we suffer a loss of vital
power, of both physical and mental energy. How, then, can food be a
support to vital power when the brain is more gravely depressed by
disease? Yet from the morning of medical history the question of how
vital power is supported in time of sickness has never been considered,
because there has never been any doubt as to the support coming from
food. I assume this to be a fact, since all works on the practice of
medicine of to-day enjoin the need to feed the sick to sustain their
depressed energies--all this without a question as to whether there is
not a possibility of adding indigestion to disease when food is enforced
against Nature's fiat.

Since vital power is centred in the brain, do we need to feed, can we
feed, for other than brain reasons? This physiology admitted, there is
no other conclusion possible than that feeding the sick is a tax on
vital power when we need all that power to cure disease.

With all this physiology behind me, for more than a score of years I
have been going into the rooms of the sick to see the evolutions of
health from disease, as I see the evolutions from the dead wastes of
March to the affluence of June, and from the first I had the exceeding
advantage of being able to study the natural history of disease, a
history in which none of the symptoms were aggravated by digestive
disturbances.

As there was no wasting of vital power in the hopeless effort to save
the body from wasting, I had a clear right to presume that my patients
recovered more rapidly and with less suffering. With no perplexing
study over what foods and what medicines to give, I could devote my
entire attention to the study of symptoms as evidences of progress
toward recovery or death; and in addition to all this there was the
great satisfaction of being strictly in line with Nature as to when and
what to eat.

As to the danger of death from mere starvation, the following remarkable
case reveals how remote it is in the ordinary history of acute diseases.
The late Rev. Dr. Merchant, of Meadville, Pa., a short time before his
death, which occurred some months ago, informed me that a brother
entered the army during the War of the Rebellion with a weight of one
hundred and fifty-nine pounds. He was sent home so wasted from
ulceration of stomach and bowels that he actually spanned his thigh with
thumb and finger. He lived ten days only, to astonish all by the
clearness of his mind even on the last day of his life, when he could
think on abstruse questions as he had never been known to do in health.
At death his body weighed only sixty pounds.

It was Dr. Merchant's opinion, from a history of the case, that no food
was digested during the last four months of his life; but it is my
opinion that it took a much longer time than this for the brain to
absorb more than ninety pounds of the body. That life was shortened by
the more rapid loss of the tissues from the disease is to be taken into
account in estimating time in starvation.




IV.


Feeding the sick! Who that rule in kitchens and feed the well do not
realize with weariness of brain the demands of the stomach that at each
meal there shall be some change in the bill of fare?

The chief reliance of physicians for the maintenance of strength while
sick bodies are being cured is milk. As a food, milk was mainly destined
for the calf, and not for man--certainly not after the coming of the
molars. It is not a food that will start the saliva in case of hunger,
as the odors from the frying-pan or from roasting fowl, yet because it
plays such an important part as a complete food for some months in the
life of the calf, and because it can be taken without especial aversion
when the odors of the cooking-stove are an offence to the nostrils; it
is given by the hour, day after day, and in some cases week after week;
and there are physicians by the thousands who reinforce this inflexible
bill of fare by the strongest alcoholics, whiskey being generally
selected.

In this connection I shall say of alcoholics that they contain not an
atom that can be converted into living atoms; they congest and irritate
the stomach, and hence lessen digestive power; and benumb all the brain
powers and faculties.

As a daily ration without change, this combination, strictly adhered to,
would prostrate the energies of a giant, and he would find himself
mustered out of all active service in less time than the hapless sick
are often compelled to endure such feeding. Does Nature so conveniently
reverse herself to meet an emergency that the sick can be built up and
sustained by such feeding as would debilitate the well?

In the city where I live the physicians average well in learning,
ability, character, and experience. Among them are the extremists in
dosage: those with a hundred remedies for a hundred symptoms; others
with such boluses as would writhe the face of an ox. There are some with
extraordinary force of command in the rooms of the sick, who believe
that whiskey is nourishing and that milk is liquid food; that doses go
into human stomachs to travel the rounds of the circulation, and finally
drop off at the right place for either patchwork or original work.

Whatever there is in drugs to cure disease, whatever in milk and the
strongest alcoholics to sustain the strength, every protracted case has
been made to reveal in their forceful hands. I have no reason to believe
they exceeded authorized treatments. I have no reason to doubt that in
all countries, in all lands, where there are educated physicians, the
same appliances are in common use, appliances that will make the next
short step from the lancet and bolus of a darker age the estimate of the
time to come.

The treatments of the sick are always changing, while the process of
cure remains the same. Only in the case of broken bones are we compelled
to let Nature do all the curing, while we may take pride in some
progress in the mechanical appliances.

As milk and stimulants are a common, authorized means to sustain the
sick, and as they are poured into human stomachs with all the faith with
which lancets were once forced into congested veins, their efficiency
for good or evil must be studied by comparison.

Treatments must lessen both the severity and the duration of disease to
be of permanent benefit. For a study by comparison, this opportunity
came to me. There was a call to attend a case of typhoid fever in a
young girl. In the same vicinity there had been under the care of one of
my forceful brethren a woman in middle life, whose stomach was
habitually rejecting all the milk and alcoholics poured into it, the
doctor having a theory that good would result no matter how brief the
time they were retained.

For a month my patient swallowed only the desired water and doses which
did not corrode, a desire for food coming at the end of the month. The
only day and night nurse was an overwrought mother, who got into bed
with the same disease as soon as the daughter got out of it. There was
another month of severer sickness, when without food and without the
horror of dosage, as before, the call for food marked the close of the
disease. My services ended here some days before the undertaker took
charge of the doctor's case.

A girl in her later teens, with a mild, so-called malarial fever, fell
into the same forceful care. There was a true history in this case of
nearly two gallons of whiskey, and daily milk from the quart at first
down to inability to take the least nourishment at last. Then there were
more than a month of days when vital power sustained itself without the
ways of violence, death occurring during the _nineteenth week_.

The ravenous brain had absorbed the lips to such thinness that the
depressions between the teeth were clearly revealed. From the first dose
to the last breath this was a case of dying, and the most persistent
fight for life against immense odds I have ever become aware of in an
acute case. In this case the stomach had become so seared by the
alcoholic that digestion was impossible, as would have been the case in
a body that was not sick.

Near this home there was a more delicate girl of about the same age
taken with the same fever; but with mild dosage and no food--in Nature's
care--hunger came at the close of the fourth week.

Later on in the same family there was a case of la grippe, in which for
several years there had been chronic, ulcerative bronchitis that bid
defiance to blisters and inhalations, the various specifics of another
forceful predecessor, who also was a believer in large doses and full
rations of alcoholized milk.

The coughing was so persistent, so continuous, that only the hypodermic
needle met the need. To prevent the tearing of a raw surface in the
bronchial tubes by the cough was as necessary as to apply splints to a
broken bone. There was no food for six weeks, and Nature made most of
her opportunity, not only to cure the acute disease, but also the
chronic disease, which for nearly ten years since has remained cured.

I was summoned to Asheville, N. C., to see a young man in the last stage
of consumption. I found him nearly a skeleton, though he had been eating
six times daily for several months by the decree of a really learned
physician. The belchings from gas were loud and frequent; the sputa by
actual measure was about six ounces during every twenty-four hours.

A fast was ordered, and on the third day a mass of undigested food was
thrown up. As soon as the stomach and bowels became empty there was
comfort all along the line, and the cough was so diminished, that less
than an ounce of sputa was raised in twenty-four hours.

After a week of fasting there came a natural desire for food, and thence
on he enjoyed without distress of stomach all he wished to take. Thence
on he lived with only the least discomfort, and with whispering lips he
dictated to me his will, conveying large property. He could look with
meaning when the power to whisper was gone, and life ended as the going
out of a candle.

For months his sufferings had nearly all been due to food masses in a
state of decomposition. He saw clearly and mentioned often that his had
been a case of starvation from overfeeding. Nature finally had to
succumb because she was not also able to deal with a clearly avoidable
disease, indigestion; but she kept up a brave fight until the body was
nearly absorbed.

As soon as the stomach and bowels became empty the friends noticed that
nervousness largely disappeared. His sleeps were much longer, because
not broken by coughing as before; and as the brain was not taxed with
food masses there was an accumulation of power that was clearly revealed
in the cheer of expression and a calmness as if heavenly rest had come
at last.

A few years ago an attorney in this city had to endure a course of fever
to which was added all the known barbarism of the times. Under enforced
food and stimulants his mind at last became so weak that the dosings
were forced down his throat. There were many weeks of life at lowest ebb
before the man of torture (the doctor) was compelled to discontinue his
evil work, and there were then months, extending to years, during which
there appeared a colorless ghost of his former self on the streets--and
this in spite of a wood-chopper's daily eatings, which were far in
excess of power to digest.

At last he was brought to his couch with a mild fever complicated with a
variety of other ailings. Not one of his friends who knew him
intimately expected his recovery, as it was believed by them that there
were chronic conditions that were beyond cure, and this because there
had been death in manner, movements, and looks for months. And yet he
had been able to take a stomach to his office every morning for many
weeks filled with pancakes, sausage, fried potatoes, etc., only to
shiver before the stove between his stomach-fillings.

To this possibly hopeless case I was called, and from that time he was
to suffer only from the disease. For nearly three weeks no food was
called for; and yet power so increased that he became able to dress
himself; and on the morning before hunger finally called for food he
came down from his bedroom with a son on his back who weighed not less
than seventy-five pounds. Thence on, life, color, mind, muscle, rapidly
came until there was such regeneration as to reveal a new body and a new
soul.

Some years before this event an only son was taken sick with a mild
fever. A young physician and friend of the patient was called whose
faith in drugs, milk, and whiskey was boundless. He was fresh from his
university, and therefore Nature had no part, through experience at the
sick-bed, in the cure of disease. For many weeks these remedies of
torture were vigorously and persistently enforced. But the time came
when Nature would bear no longer. The father, a personal friend, came to
see me simply to unburden himself, and as he was not able to give me the
case I was unprofessional enough to advise that the attendance should
go on, but that there should be a complete rest the physician should not
know of. This was done, and in a few days there was a call for food, the
first call in more than two months. Of course, there was a recovery,
which was an exceeding victory for Nature against extraordinarily
adverse conditions, but it required many months to restore the wrecked
balance.

As I write this experience the following comes to me as a still stronger
indictment against authorized medical method. A. B., when in the early
maturity of his physical manhood, was stricken with a partial paralysis
that sent him to his bed. It was simply the case of a wound of the brain
requiring rest as the chief condition for cure. But milk, whiskey, and
drugs were used with the greatest persistence, and after three months he
became able to be about, no less feeble in mind than in body, and with
teeth utterly ruined by the dosage. For fully five years he went about
his home and along the streets as one in a dream. For ten years there
was inability to attend to his ordinary business. Life came at last
through the no-breakfast plan.

The most remarkable fight for life on the part of Nature against the
adverse conditions of drugs, alcoholics, and milk I have ever known was
in the following case: A spare woman, of perhaps forty years, came to
her bed the victim of habitual bromidia and chloral, invited by severe
headaches. The treatment of this case was as follows: whiskey every
hour, milk every other hour; corrosive medication and powerful brain
sedative every night, which would have paralyzed digestive energy for
many days. There was not an hour during the twenty-four in which there
was not dosing either to cure the disease or to sustain the system. The
average quantity of whiskey was six ounces daily, and of milk nearly a
quart. This treatment was borne for weeks, merging into months. There
was no disease not caused by the treatments, and the battle went on
until there was only the shadow of a woman left when Nature rebelled
against further violence. A few days of peace were granted because hope
had departed; but it took Nature more than a year to recover from the
damage.

A man of iron and steel, in the early prime of life, was the victim of a
severe injury. With the agony of lacerated nerves and the hypodermic
needle to make the digestion of food impossible, milk and whiskey were
poured into an unwilling stomach from the first, and both were used
until neither could be retained; and then the lower bowel was
extemporized into a stomach. For one hundred and forty-six days, from
three to seven doses of morphine were put into the arm daily; and
morphine dries both mouth and stomach and lessens all energies of the
brain. The body itself was not sick; there was no hint of disease in it;
yet there were drugs prescribed that cost dollars by the score, and
there were alcoholics by the gallon. For months the pain, alcoholics,
and morphine kept the mind in such a daze that there were only the
imbecilic mutterings of a dreamer in trouble.

The only treatment indicated in this case was the best of surgery for
the injury, and some easing doses for a short while at first, to relieve
pain. No food would be desired or digested; so the fast would go on
until there would be a natural hunger, which would only manifest itself
when there would be marked relief from pain. The meals, thence on, would
be so far apart that all would be keenly relished; and there could be no
loss of weight when meals would be so taken.

It is not surprising when I say that a seared stomach and a brain
converted into a whiskey pickle had no part in the digestion of milk:
else why did the weight of one hundred and sixty pounds at the time of
the accident fall to eighty-five at the time of hunger? And all this
drugging and alcoholics for a man who was not really sick! and the bill
of fare that was not changed during one hundred and sixty days! and the
time lost, and the expense entailed, and the anxious, aching hearts that
were nearest the bed of horrors--of horrors, torments clearly invited.

By way of contrast the following case is given. During vacation a lad of
twelve years of one of my families took to his bed with appendicitis in
severe form. A learned physician was called, and there were many days of
morphine, with other medication and all the food that could be coaxed
into an unwilling stomach. Enough morphine was given daily to paralyze
digestive energy for at least two or three days in one in ordinary
health. There was a month of this war against Nature, when the violence
of the acute attack subsided and a partial victory was gained against
great odds.

On my return I found him under heavy dosage for the recovery of strength
and lost appetite. Colorless, anaemic, languid--he was barely able to
walk. He was immediately put under my care, and therefore under a fast
that ended in a few days in such hunger as had not been felt in several
months; and color, cheer, energy, weight evolved in a month. But there
was also a developing abscess deep in the groin, and the time came when
a grave operation was necessary to save life. He was made ready for the
surgeon's knife that cut its way down, down many inches to relieve walls
ready to burst from the tension. The wound remained in the care of the
surgeon, but the life in my care. Who deny that the anaesthetic, the
shock of the operation, and the subsequent pain will not abolish all
power to digest as well as all the desire for food? Here was a patient
waiting for Nature to rally, which she did on the third day in a call
for food; and thence on one daily meal was keenly relished, and the
wound was healed--a wound that was three inches long on the surface and
six inches deep. On the fifteenth day the lad was able to be dressed and
able to walk about his room, and with a freshness of color that was
never observed in him before. What law of body was violated in the
preliminary treatment intended to prepare Nature for the ordeal and to
enable her to rally from it?

This fresh tragedy in one human life has become known to me while I
write. A man, a giant, in his eighty-eighth year, lost his appetite, and
was put to death by the following means: A pint of whiskey and from one
to two quarts of milk daily to keep him nourished. Five months passed
without any change in the bill of fare--five months of delirium, of
imbecilic muttering before the last breath was drawn. These tragedies
are common the world over. Do I cry against them with too loud a voice?
Would that I had a voice of thunder!

I have given a few examples of the crucifixions of the sick and the
afflicted, whereof I have many, and they are the real history of cases
known, and are constantly occurring in every community.

The cure of disease and injury by fasting--the mode of Nature--made the
greatest impression in families in which there was intelligence enough
to comprehend it; but the victories of Nature were complicated by cases
in which death was inevitable. With a feeling that I must give the new
hygiene to the world in printed form, I did not enlarge in public over a
method that would be certain to be suggestive of starvation, where food
was supposed to be of the greatest importance.

My sick-room success failed to enable me to draw larger checks; but the
satisfaction of going into the rooms of the sick and not having to rack
my mind over what medicine to give, what food to be taken, was a great
compensation for the absence of a large bank account. Professional
attainments and abilities play only a small part in the mere business
side of the medical profession. An innocent public believes with intense
convictions in the efficacy of dosage; and with distorted vision, as the
famous knight of La Mancha, sees giants in professional healers who are
really only windmills, with whom personal contact in the sick-room is
only too often a danger measured by its closeness.

Think of the wasting of the body during sickness; of the brain system,
which is life itself, that does not waste: think of the cases of
recovery in which for weeks no food is possible for stomach reasons; of
the more frequent cases in which recoveries take place after weeks of
such scant food as not to be taken into account as a support to vital
power by minds governed by reason. Think how disease, in proportion to
its severity, is a loss of digestive power, and with cure energy
entirely of the brain, how serious a matter it is to lessen it by waste
of energy in forcing decomposing food masses through a digestive channel
nearly two rods long, food masses that the brain will have none of, and
that do not save the fat and muscles; think of all this physiology, and
raise this question: "Is this man alone in his faith and practice, or
is Nature so in line with him that the entire medical profession is
wrong in their dosings and feedings?"

I conclude these cases with an illustration. Think of all this enforced
feeding, of the doses to relieve, of the wasting of brain power, and
compare with the following illustration, in which case no food was taken
for thirty-six days, and yet it was possible for the patient to be about
during the greater part of the time.

    NOTE.--In this case severe indigestion and nervous troubles and
    almost daily headaches had been a torture for years. On the
    morning of the thirty-sixth day, on which the photograph was
    taken, a visit to the dentist for the extraction of a tooth
    revealed no fear, as had formerly been the case. Eating was
    resumed on the thirty-eighth day with no inconvenience. Since
    then (over six months ago) no trace of the former troubles has
    reappeared. Loss of weight about twenty pounds.

[Illustration: Photograph, by Henry Ritter.

MRS. A. M. LICHTENHAHN,

THIRTY-SIXTH DAY WITHOUT FOOD.]




V.


"Physician, heal thyself!" There is a world of sarcasm in these three
words; for about the only advantage the physician has over the laity is
that he can do his own dosing. As a general fact, he does no more to
prevent bodily ailings than other people, and is just as liable to
become the victim of bad habits.

It is my impression that, in proportion, as many physicians become the
slaves of tobacco, opium in some form, and alcoholics as are to be found
in any other class of people; they are quite as likely to be the victims
of various chronic ailings as other people, and with equal impotency to
relieve. Every day I see physicians going to the homes of the sick with
cigars on fire, signals of the brain system in distress undergoing the
lullaby of nicotine; going into rooms where the purest air of heaven
ought to prevail, as animated tobacco-signs.

Where is there virtue in this world that is of any practical good whose
vital force is not to be found in example rather than in precept? Who
has more need to go into the room of the sick with the purest breath,
the cleanest tongue, the brightest eyes, the purest complexion, the most
radiant countenance, and with a soul free from the bonds of ailings or
habits that offend and disable, than the physician? Where is the logic
of employing the sick to feed the sick? Is not that a sick doctor whose
nerves are so full of plaints as to need the frequent soothings only
found in a cigar, that also sears the nerves of taste? Is he not very
sick when those nerves require the stronger alcoholic?

There is contagion in good health and sound morals, when daily
illustrated, no less than in courage and fear. No physician can be at
his best in the rooms of the sick if he be under any bondage from
disease or habit.

"Physician, heal thyself!" Physician, how does it happen that you have
need to be healed, and of what worth are you if you can neither prevent
disease nor cure yourself with your dosings? What availeth it to a man
to talk righteously when virtue is not in him?

Ailings, habits blunt all the special senses and the finer instincts and
tastes, and impair the power to reason clearly, to infer correctly, to
conclude wisely. Only the well have that hopefulness that comes from
power in reserve, power that is not wasted through acquired disease and
acquired habits. The contagion of health is a power no less than courage
or fear.

That man, self-poised, void of fear, General Grant, crushed the
Rebellion with a single sentence, "I will fight it out on this line if
it takes all summer." That sentence made every man in his army a Grant
in courage and confidence. Grant in his prime could puff his cigar while
commanding all the armies of his country; but the cigar ultimately
destroyed his life, and there was no physician to interpose to prevent
one of the most torturing of deaths.

Where is the logic of the sick trying to heal the sick? This question
will be more frequently asked in that time to come when the drug-store
annex to the sick-room will be much smaller than is now thought
necessary.

Human expression is studied in the rooms of the sick as nowhere else;
and if the lines are not obscured by the fogs and clouds of disease the
signs can be much more clearly distinguished.

A man is now under my care whose soul is of the largest mould, and who
is so supremely endowed by reason of intellect, varied tastes and
acquirements, as to make life on earth well worth living. His long
chronic local ailment has not impaired his power to read me for signs of
hope as it seems to me I have never been read before; and never before
have I so felt the need to enter a room of the sick with a larger stock
of general health. For the time I seem to him to be holding before his
eyes the keys of life or death.

The physician should be able to go into the room of the sick to see with
clearest vision whatever is revealed to the natural eye; and no less to
see with eyes of understanding that he may be an interpreter of
conditions that indicate recovery or death. He is the historian of
disease, and therefore before he can write he must see clearly all that
can be known about the process of cure as revealed by symptoms.

The eye is at its best only in perfect health no less than the reason,
the judgment, and the spirits. A few years ago a drouth of many weeks
occurred; in some meadows and pastures the grass seemed dead, beyond the
possibility of growth. Every shade of the green had departed; but warm
rains came, and in a few days there was a green carpet plush-like in its
softness and delicacy.

So the progress of cure may be read on the tongue, on the skin, in the
eyes, where there are both eyesight and insight to see and to study.




VI.


For many years I entered the rooms of the sick a sick man myself; I was
the victim of that monster of hydraheads, dyspepsia, or, to call it by a
more modern title, indigestion.

In my later teens my stomach began seriously to complain over its tasks,
and a pint of the essence of bitterness was procured to restore it to
power. My mouth was filled with teeth of the sweet kind; hence my horror
for the doses far exceeded the milder protests of the stomach. Not the
slightest benefit came from my medicinal sufferings, and this ended all
routine treatment of my stomach. My intense aversion to the flavor of
strong medicines caused me to inflict them as rarely as possible upon
other mouths during the drug period of my practice.

Mine seemed to be a weary stomach, in which the tired sense was a close
approach to acute pain for hours after each meal. When a medical student
I found nothing in the books, in the advice of my preceptor, nor in the
lectures at the university, but what proposed to cure me through drugs
that were abhorrent. As I never encountered any cures nor received the
slightest benefit from my experiments, I was deterred from injuring
myself through persistent dosage.

In the early part of my student career I was behind a drug-counter,
where I had ample experience in putting up prescriptions, and had an
excellent opportunity to measure medical men as revealed in their
formulas and the results in many cases in which failure was the rule in
chronic ailings; and I was not encouraged to abuse myself through the
results as revealed by any form of medication.

For the benefit of those who suffer from complainings of the stomach I
give a condensed summing-up of myself. I was born with a wiry
constitution, but of the lean kind, and a weak stomach, the chiefest
ancestral legacy. With ability to see with intense sense very much to
enjoy in this world, my resources in this way were boundless, hence I
was always full of hope and cheer.

All the senses of my palate were of the acute kind, and so were a
continual source of the penalties of gluttony. Whatever else there might
be alack with me, there was never a lack of appetite. I was able to eat
at each meal food enough which, if fully digested, would have redeemed
the wastes of any day of labor; and not only this, but also enough of
sugar-enticing foods to anticipate the wastes of the following day.

Growing up in the country and with an intense fondness for the tart
sweetness of apples, pears, and peaches, and the harmlessness of eating
them no matter how full the stomach with hearty food, without question
my stomach was never void of pomace during the entire fruit season.

Whenever I sat down to eat there was an onrush of all the senses of the
palate as the outrush of imprisoned children to the ecstatic activities
of the school-yard; hence over-eating always, with never a sense of
satiety. The penalties were realized in painful digestion, with the
duodenum the chiefest of protesting voices.

A time came when gas would so accumulate as to make the heart labor from
mere pressure, the inevitable insufficiency of breath causing a lack of
aeration of the blood. With a constant waste of power in the stomach
there was always a sense of weariness; hence I was never able to know
the luxury of power in reserve. All through life my best efforts were
the result of intellectual inebriation, with always corresponding
exhaustion as the direct result. This weakness compelled me to waste the
least time on people who could not interest me, and to spend much time
alone to recharge my exhausted batteries.

For such a case as mine there is not to-day to be found an intelligent
hint in any medical text-book as to the physiological way to recovery.

The breakfasts in my house were of a character that, without ham,
sausage, eggs, steaks, or chops, they would not have been considered
worth spending time over. I had reached a time when a general collapse
seemed to be impending; but it was stayed for a few years by the new
life that came to me through the evolutions of health in the rooms of
the sick that seemed to portend possible professional glories: but as
the years went on I suffered more and more from nervous prostration
through waste of power in the stomach.

My friends began to enlarge upon my wretched looks, and with no little
concern; but none were wise enough to realize that my need was for words
that reminded of life and not of death.

By chance I met an old friend on the street when he happened to be
thinking about ways in daily food in Europe, from which he had just
returned, and at once he began to talk, not about my wretched looks, but
about the exceedingly light breakfasts customary in all the great
centres where he had been. They consisted only of a roll and a cup of
coffee. I was impressed just enough not to forget the fact, but without
there being a hint in it to set me to thinking.

But the time came, "the fulness of time." There came a morning when for
the first time I remembered that when in ordinary health I had no desire
to breakfast; but there was a sense of such general exhaustion from
power wasted over an unusual food mass not needed at the previous
evening meal that my morning coffee was craved as the morning dram by
the chronic toper. Only this, and a forenoon resulted of such comfort of
body, such cheer, and such mental and physical energy as had never been
realized since my young manhood was happy in the blessed
unconsciousness of having a stomach that, no matter how large or how
numerous the daily meals, never complained.

As for the dinner that followed, it was taken with an acuteness of
relish and was handled with a power of digestion that were also a new,
rich experience; but the afternoon fell far short of the forenoon. The
experience was so remarkable that I at once gave up all eating in the
morning, and with such reviving effects upon all my powers that the
results began to be noticed by all friends.

So originated the no-breakfast plan. Up to this time I had never had a
thought of advising anyone to do without food when desired; much less
that any of the three daily meals should be given up. My war was against
feeding when acute sickness had abolished all desire for food, and this
I had been able to conduct many years without exciting suspicion of a
general practice of homicide.

The improvement in my own case was so instant and so marked that I began
to advise the same to others, and with the result that each would make
known the redeeming work to suffering friends, and so the idea spread in
a friend-to-friend way.

Now the American breakfast, in point of sheer necessity, is believed to
be the most important meal of the day, as the means for strength that is
to be called out for the forenoon of labor, and believed with a force of
insistence that warrants a conclusion that a night of sleep is more
exhausting to all the powers than the day of labor.

To go into the fresh air, to do anything with an empty stomach, is to
invite a fainting by the way, is the general impression; but there were
scarcely any cases in which there was not sufficient improvement to
prevent all possibility of a return to the heavy breakfasts that had
been abandoned.

How did this scheme affect me in a professional way, that is, in the
reputation as a physician of average balance of brain functions? Some of
my professional brethren of strong conviction and ready command of
language began at once to try to abolish the dangerous heresy by
suggesting that on this one subject I was absolutely crazy. Of course,
their patrons took up this idea with avidity; and so there was a babble
of tongues, with myself the central point of attack as crank-in-chief of
all cranks. This is not the language of exaggeration; for whatever the
law and modern civilization permitted to abolish me professionally was
inflicted with tongues by the thousands, the war being made all the more
exciting and interesting by the enthusiasm of new recruits to the heresy
from the professional domains of my medical brethren.

What did I gain by this professionally? Mostly the odium of heresy
during the first few years; but with it was the supreme satisfaction
that came from seeing more additions to bright eyes and happy faces than
medicine ever gave, and in a way that would redound to my own good at
some time. The fact is, that as a means to better health, no matter what
nor where the disease, there is no limit to its application. As a
universal panacea its powers are matchless.

For a time I saw no farther than a cure of stomach condition and
resulting general comfort. That any disease was to be cured otherwhere
than in the stomach by means so simple, did not occur as an original
conception; but the fact that giving up the morning meal was attended
with improvement of all local diseases set me to thinking. Many of my
patients became thin under the regime; but as this was attended by an
increase of strength, not even the alarm of anxious friends without
faith was ever able to induce a return fully to the old ways.

But how explain the loss of weight? A clue came from the following case:
The first-born of a young mother had an habitual diarrhoea from birth
lasting many months; and yet it seemed well nourished, for it was
unusually fat and heavy for its age; but the days and nights were long
in the care of this apparently well-nourished child. The symptoms were
heedless to the every-hour dosing of pellets, or from the tumblers of
apparently purest water.

Now this mother, young as she was, was a woman of convictions, and with
courage to follow each to an ultimate conclusion. She had heard of
miracles resulting from only three feedings per day during the nursing
period; and so, notwithstanding a storm of opposition from a vast
circle of relatives, she put this first-born rigidly on the three-meal
plan, with the result of immediate cessation of the bowel trouble, but
with rapid decline in weight.

This caused anxiety, and I was called upon for advice. In every respect
except the weight-loss the improvement was wonderful. After much thought
there was a sudden flash of the truth: there were an abnormal weight and
bulk, due to the general dropsy of debility, similar in character to the
swelling of the feet and limbs in the old and feeble. The thickened
walls of the bloodvessels, toned with health, caused absorption; but the
eyes of the friends would not open to the miracle for a very long time,
and so render justice to the heroine, the young mother. As an aider and
abettor of such a flagrant system of starvation, I had my full share of
opprobrium; but, aided by the strong-minded, sensible mother, Nature
gained a sweeping victory, and thus this case cleared my mind from
confusion as to the anomaly.

One of my medical friends with whom calomel was as a sheet-anchor often
asserted that babies would actually get fat on it. That bulk would
actually increase by use of the forceful medicine is likely; but that
the increase would be dropsical I think is unquestionable.

The dropsy of debility is due to a loss of tone of the vascular system;
the walls of the vessels become thinner and therefore dilate. In the
feet and limbs of the old and greatly enfeebled by disease the veins
become distended to abnormal size by the force of gravity, resulting in
effusion of water into the cellular tissues, which increases when in the
upright position during the day and decreases when in the horizontal
position at night.

A toning up of the entire vascular system, by which a reverse current
from the tissues into the bloodvessels is made possible, is the only
means for relief.

This flash-light upon the part physics plays in the cure of disease put
me upon the true lines of investigation, and furnished a key for the
solution of many problems. From this time on I was to be kept busy, not
in winning victories, but in studying them.

This new physiology was not fully apprehended until long after the
no-breakfast plan was taken up. It came to me link by link; but the
missing link was the fact that food only restores waste, that lost
strength is only restored by sleep; and it now seems to me that I was
very dull not to have found it out long before I did. It seems to me
that no method of health culture, none in the treatment of disease can
have any physiological basis where these facts are not taken into
account.

For a time I failed to look beyond the ailments of the stomach for
curative results, until really surprising news began to reach me from
many sources. There would come to me those who had to tell about clearer
vision, acuter hearing, a stronger sense of smelling, etc., senses that
were not thought to be affected by disease; or there would be news that
chronic, local ailings, as nasal or bronchial catarrhs, skin diseases,
hemorrhoids, or other intractable disease, in some mysterious manner,
were undergoing a decline under the new regime.

In the domain of drugs we have medicines that vivid imagination has
endowed with presumed affinities for locations that are diseased. They
enter the circulation and happily get off at the right spot, to act
curatively; but no theories are advanced as to how they aid in the
construction of new cells or atoms, or how they aid in the disposal of
the old ones.

Construction, destruction! There is no death of atoms: really nothing is
generated, nothing destroyed: the change is but the rearranging of
ultimate elements; and how is a drug to influence any more than would be
in case of the affinities of chemistry?

Hazy conceptions, crude means! The ultimate cell multiplies by division
to become bone, nails, hair, ligaments, muscles, fat, the brain, the
whole body. Where along the line in the reconstructive work called by a
disease or injury is a medicine to apply with power to aid? In what way
the need to be expressed, in what operative way the helpful assistance
made clear, that faith without works that are seen can be made strong?

The chemist never rushes into print with news that another element has
been discovered until demonstrative evidence has placed the matter
beyond all question. If anything new is discovered in the firmaments,
adequate means to an end will be able to reveal it to all interested
eyes.

The impressions of science are quite different from the impressions of
the materia medica; and the miracles of cure that are displayed by the
column in even the highest class public prints are never in reach of
scientific explanation.

A new element is announced; we know instantly that it has been actually
discovered. A new cure is announced; we instantly may know that the
evidences will never be displayed along the lines of science.

I now unfold a theory of my own of the origin and development of
disease, and the development of cure, in which the physical changes
involved in some of the processes are in reach of the microscope.

It is my impression that, with rare exceptions, people are born with
actual structural weaknesses, local or general, that may be called
ancestral legacies. These are known as constitutional tendencies to
disease.

In parts structurally weak at birth the bloodvessels, because of thin
and weak walls, are larger than in normal parts, and because of
dilatation the blood circulates slower. There is an undue pressure upon
all between-vessel structures, a pressure that must lessen the nutrient
supply more or less, according to its degree. The death of parts in
boils and abscesses is due, I believe, to strangulation of the
nerve-supply. The bloodvessels are elastic, and capable of contraction
and dilatation, a matter regulated by the brain.

Now in these weaknesses always lie the possibilities of disease; they
may be supposed the weak links in the constitutional chain, and can no
more be made stronger than the constitutional design than can the body
as a whole. By whatever means brain power is lessened abnormality is
incited in the weak parts; hence gradually from the original weakness
there is a summing up, as a bronchial or nasal catarrh, or other acute
or chronic local or general disease.

The first step in any disease is the impression that lessens brain
power; the slightest depressing emotion, the slightest sense of
discomfort, lessens brain power, and to a like degree the tone of all
the bloodvessels; hence dilatation in degree. That the stomach, as the
most abused organ of the body, plays the largest part in over-drafts
upon the brain is not a matter of doubt.

Let us develop a chronic disease along these lines, with nasal catarrh
for an illustration. As tone is regulated entirely by the brain system,
all taxing of the brain increases the debility of the nasal structures.
In course of time the debility so increases through whatever also
debilitates the brain, that a stage is reached when water in the blood
begins to escape through the thin walls of the vessels and mingles with
the natural secretion of the membrane, and a catarrhal discharge is the
result. In severe cases a time may be reached when death of parts from
the strangling pressure may occur, and then we have an ulcerative
catarrh.

This evolution will go on as determined by the gravity of the ancestral
weakness, by the natural strength of the dynamo, the brain, and the
severity of the debilitating forces to which it may be subjected.

No one is ever attacked by a nasal or any other catarrh, nor by any
other chronic ailings. They all start from structural weaknesses that
are inherited, and they are the evolutionary results of brain-wearying
forces.

If a specialist were asked to express the actual condition of a diseased
structure that seems to call for medicinal aid, and to tell just how
medicated sprays, washes, and douches are to reach all the parts
involved, with healing power, and in what way that power is
exercised--in other words, what work actually is to be done, and how
medicine is to do it--he would not be able to enlighten his questioner
no matter how fertile his conception, how dexterous his use of language.
In fact, the healing power of drugs exists in fertile imaginations
rather than among those ultimate processes where disease is cured, where
disease destroys.

As the care moves by the power evolved in the dynamo, so do the
bloodvessels contract and relax as determined by brain conditions.
Dilating bloodvessels, effusion of water from thinning walls, the
between-vessels starving pressure, increasing general debility of all
the structures involved--this is the gradual evolution of catarrh and of
all other chronic diseases.

From this it was seen that no form of local treatment can avail to
relieve the operative cause in cases of this kind. Tone must be added to
all the weakened, dilated vessels, in order to contract and thicken
their walls so as to stop the leakage, and to relieve that pressure upon
the between structures that have become anaemic through lack of
nourishment.

That an evolution in reverse is the one need scarcely calls for
argument. It is the brain that needs our attention, and we meet its need
by saving its rare powers from wasting.

We will do this by cutting down, as far as possible, all the activities
for which it furnishes power, even as we would diminish the number of
cars where power in the dynamo had become deficient; we will either
sever the wires that connect with the stomach, or make a marked
reduction in the labor to be performed in the stomach. With power
accumulating in the brain, power will reach the utmost recesses of
debility and disease, with Nature to do all the healing.

To reinforce this physiology, this statement may be made with the
strongest emphasis: the medical treatment of chronic disease fails
inevitably because it fails to consider the vital force involved. The
brain has no part in the treatment of chronic disease by the specialist,
where drugs are a means to an end never reached: there are only a
disappointment and an interchange of pocket-books.

In all parts suffering with pain there is congestion, swelling. The
bloodvessels are distended; hence the nerves suffer violence in
stretching or from pressure. The pain simply adds to the abnormal
conditions by causing an active determination of the blood to the
involved parts. To relieve pain, then, is curative, because it lessens
the abnormal congestion.

The no-breakfast plan with me proved a matter of life unto life. With my
morning coffee there were forenoons of the highest physical energy, the
clearest condition of mind, and the acutest sense of everything
enjoyable.

The afternoons were always in marked sluggishness by contrast, from the
taxing of digestion.

Without realizing that the heavy meals of the day were a tax upon the
brain, I would scarcely get away from the table before I began to feel
more generally tired out than the severest taxing from a long forenoon
of general activity ever made me. With the filled stomach, fatigue,
general exhaustion, came as a sudden attack rather than as an evolution
from labor, and there would be several hours of unfitness for doing any
kind of service well.

In the application of this method to others I had the great satisfaction
of good results without any exceptions; and the missionary work was
begun by friends among friends, fairly spreading better health and
adding thereby more and more disaster to my name.

More and more I became a focus of adverse criticism in all matters where
level-headedness was deemed important. My acute cases began to be
watched with hostile interest, as if homicide from starvation were the
inevitable result in all cases. My country had become the country of an
enemy.

Not being able to give my patients clearly defined reasons for the
general and local improvements resulting from a forenoon fast as a
method in hygiene, it had to be spread from relieved persons to
suffering friends; and according to the need, the sufferers from various
ailings would be willing to try anything new where efforts through the
family physician or patent medicines had completely failed; it was
spread as if by contagion, among the failures of the medical profession.

Among those to become interested at an early date was a prominent
minister who wore the title of D. D., and for a time his interest was
intense. He came to me one day with word that a member of his household,
well known to me as a young woman of unusual ability and culture, had
not been able to take solid food at his table for a year, and he
believed that my treatment would avail in her case. To this she was very
averse, since every treatment her hapless stomach had received had only
added to the debility, until disability had become the result. She
finally came to me to be relieved from the forceful importunity of her
reverend friend, who had excited my eager interest with a prophecy that
unusual literary distinction would follow a cure, as there were
abilities of the very highest order, in his estimation.

She came, and I had no difficulty in securing such a vacation for the
worn-out stomach that it could begin with solid food when the time to
eat arrived. The vacation was so brief and power had accumulated so
rapidly that almost any food could be taken without discomfort, and no
trouble ever came not invited by a relapse from the better way of living
that had really created a new stomach.

This case caused more notoriety over the no-breakfast plan than any that
ever occurred in the city. As a writer of biographies and of articles in
high-class journals and magazines, this talented woman has been a
miracle of patient, persistent study and investigation.

This endorsement in high places greatly added to my reputation as a
physician with distorted mind, for the idea that any good could come
from a short fast, to be followed by the giving up of that needed
morning meal, was too absurd for sober reflection, too violently
revolutionary to be even patiently considered.

The no-breakfast plan was not so very long in becoming known over the
entire city; a bridge had been crossed, and every plank taken up and
destroyed; thence the ways into new families were nearly closed.

I am enlarging a little upon the opposition that met me from all points,
because all who are to be convinced that these are the true ways in
health culture will begin at once to enlighten their ailing friends, and
will, therefore, encounter the same opposition. "Sir, you have not had
enough opposition," said bluff, old Samuel Johnson. There will be no
need to complain of any lack of this kind in the efforts to render
suffering friends the only aid possible, that will be in persistent
efforts of Nature.

My medical brethren considered the scheme only as they would consider an
invasion of smallpox or a heresy whose methods were a danger to life.
One physician, a woman specialist, informed me that she was continually
importuned as to her professional opinion of the new craze that had
invaded the city. That all other physicians were equally called upon,
that they would condemn, was inevitable; and I permitted them the
largest liberty without the least resentment; but there was the
sustaining cheer of seeing the happiest faces that only increased as the
heresy spread.

My attendance upon the severely sick became more taxing because of the
exceeding concern in the immediate environment, that the pangs of
starvation were being added to the pangs of disease.

As none of my professional brethren ever manifested any desire to be
enlightened on this subject, I did not volunteer, since I felt the wiser
way would be to wait an adequate amount of evidence before making any
public announcements of presumed important discoveries in practical
hygiene.

My experiences in the rooms of the sick had convinced me, long before I
gave up my morning meal, that death from starvation was so remote as
practically to exclude it from consideration; hence with the great
improvement that was the immediate result in my own case I could from
the first speak with a "thus saith the Lord" emphasis on the safety of
going through a forenoon "on an empty stomach."

As no one could come into my office without my being able to give the
assurance of at least some relief that would be immediately realized,
that would be felt even to the finger-ends, my office became more and
more a lecture-room, a school of health culture for the education of
missionaries, for a friend-to-friend uplifting into higher life.

All I needed for my own sake was that missing link to clothe my words
with all the desired power. With so much to enliven, to encourage, it
was as if I were sitting at the very feet of Nature, so thrilled by her
wonderful stories that I was utterly unconscious of the storm of
ridicule and epithet to which I was subjected.

Once in a while Nature would favor me with a miracle in the way of an
inspiring change. A man in the early prime of life had reached a
condition in which he habitually rejected every breakfast. Two trips to
Europe and a year in the hands of a Berlin specialist for the stomach
failed to relieve; and yet he was not so disabled as to prevent him
attending to his ordinary business affairs; the stomach seemed to be
eccentric in being merely irritable without structural disease.

I asked him if he felt that the breakfasts which would not stay down
were doing him any good. To this he had to assent that they were not. I
told him if the breakfast only to result in a heave-offering were
omitted he would be better able for his duties of the forenoon. He began
at once to raise his brows.

It was not difficult for him to see that if no breakfasts were put into
his stomach none would have to be thrown up with sickening effort, and
hence he could not but be better for the forenoon services if the sick
spell were omitted. The fact was, the breakfast would soon be rejected,
and then the hours of rest would enable the stomach to handle the dinner
without the repetition of the morning sickness.

Only a few words from me of this kind, and thence on there were no
breakfasts; and from the first all the complaints from the stomach
ceased, and he used to remark that he began to get well as soon as I
began to talk to him.

Now this man with his family was a recent arrival in this city, and his
first intimate acquaintance was one who had been relieved of weekly
headaches of a skull-bursting kind through the no-breakfast plan--thus
the missionary contagion.

For many years I was content to allow people to have the morning coffee
or tea as desired, with the largest liberty of dinner gluttony; and this
was really the only means possible for the introduction of an innovation
so radical. To have given nothing to relieve the morning want for
something in the stomach to set the wheels of life in motion would have
been a failure from the first. With all the coffee break of the fast was
attended by so marked an increase of cheer and general strength, and the
enjoyment of the general meal at or before noon was so immeasurably
increased, that the method spread as a contagion against which
professional denouncement and ridicule were in vain.

And with all converts I found that the experiences in the penalties of
gluttony were so enlightening, so restraining, that there was apparently
little need to say much more as to the quantity or quality of food, what
and how to eat.

The enthusiasm of all over the forenoons of power and comfort, to be
followed by a luxury of meals never before realized, fully satisfied my
pride in professional success; and all the more because the penalties of
gluttony were seldom charged to my account.

It was only after the missing link was found and added to the chain that
I could fully realize the enormous waste of strength and the mental and
moral degradation from eating food in excess, because the enticements of
relish are taken for the actual needs of the body. Think of it! Actual
soul power involved in ridding the stomach and bowels of the foul sewage
of _food in excess_, _food_ in a state of decomposition, to be forced
through nearly two rods of bowels and largely at the expense of the soul
itself!!

Oh, gluttony, with its jaws of death, its throat an ever-open gate to
the stomach of torment!




VII.


When I finally arrived at a point of vision where I could see the
stomach as a mere machine, that it could no more act without brain-power
than brawny arms with their nerves severed could wield a sledge, I began
a study of digestion with new interest, with a view to save power from
undue waste.

It is the _sense of relish_, of flavor, that is behind all the woes of
indigestion, and not the sense of hunger. The sweetened foods; the pies,
cakes, puddings, etc., that are eaten merely from a sense of relish
after the sense of hunger has become fully sated, and generally by far
more of the plainer foods than waste demands, is the wrecking sin at all
but the humblest tables.

_Rapid eating_, by which there is imperfect solution of the tougher
solids and a filling of the stomach before the hunger sense can
naturally be appeased, is the additional evil to insure serious
consequences to the stomach and brain.

For merely _practical purposes_, all that is necessary to know about the
digestive process is that by a peculiar arrangement of the muscle forces
of the stomach the food is made to revolve in such a way as to wipe the
exuding digestive juice from the walls; that, therefore, the finer the
division of the solids by mastication the more rapid the solution to the
absorbing condition. That meat in finer particles will sooner dissolve
than meat in large, solid masses is clearly seen.

It will be recalled that digestive conditions are really soul
conditions, as if there were actual wires extending from the very depths
of the soul itself to each individual gland, with power to ebb and flow
as the mental condition shall determine.

It may be presumed that _power_ to digest is the power to revolve food
in the stomach and the power to generate the gastric juice as determined
by the power of the brain, the glands themselves not holding their juice
in mere reserve, but power to generate in reserve. Thus it is seen that
food in excess is in every way exhaustive as the immediate result.

These may be called the subjective conditions of digestion. Now let us
consider some of the objective conditions from the standpoint of moral
science. What the sunshine of a warm day is to all growing things on the
earth, so is that shining seen in other faces that reaches the depths of
the human soul with brightness and life.

_Overeating_ is so universal from the general ignorance of practical
physiology that few stomachs have a time for a full clearing with the
needed rest before the time of another filling arrives. It is therefore
a matter of sheer necessity not only to attain and maintain the utmost
possible cheer of soul, but it is also a necessity to have cheer in
other souls with whom relations are intimate.

As a matter of extraneous _digestive aid_, a cheerful soul in a family
is an abiding source of digestive energy to all in social contact. It
affects the digestive energy of all, as the breeze the fire, as the
clearing sky the low spirits from the gloom of chill and fogs. The eyes
that do not glisten with higher life, the lines upon the face that are
not alive with cheerful, kindly emotions, the frowning look, the word
that cuts deeply, have their repressive effects upon digestive energy
within their remorseless reach.

The _moral science_ of digestive energy is a new study; it is not known
as a factor in the process of digestion; but the time is coming when
cheer of soul will become a study as of one of the finer arts, and then
human homes will not be so much like lesser lunatic asylums without the
restraining hands of a wise superintendent.

Life will be different in homes when all within the age of reason shall
realize that their words without kindness, their looks without cheer,
are forces that tend to physical and moral degradation, really nothing
less than death-dealing energies upon all lives within their reach. The
power of human kindness has ever been a favorite theme with the
moralist, but it has not been considered with reference to its power
upon digestion.

_Anger_ is mental and moral chaos; it is insanity; it is revenge in the
fury of a hurricane; and sensitive natures have the greatest need for
the largest measure of health in order that these human tempests shall
be under larger restraint.

The gloomy, the irritable, the dyspeptic Christian is a dispenser of
death and not of the higher life, and his religious faith does not
spread by the contagiousness of example: and because of the solemnity,
of the exceeding importance of his sense of the possibilities of the
life beyond death he has all the more need to have that physical and
moral strength that his daily walk, conversation, and mien may be
consistent, forceful, and uplifting.

To this great end study, study to see _cheer_ everywhere, and above all
things to possess it. Good health is also contagious, and, no less than
disease, has a reflex impression. Only above the chill dampness, the
fogs, and clouds is the clear sky with the blazing sun. There are
undreamed-of possibilities of getting above the worriments of life
through an intelligent understanding and application of the physiology
of cheer as the chief force in the life of the body, mind, and soul.




VIII.


Having finally arrived at the conviction that from the first wink in the
morning until the last at night strength departs, not in any way to be
kept up by food, that from the last wink at night until the first in the
morning strength returns, I became fully endowed to tell all the sick
and afflicted in the most forceful way that with the strength of the
brain recharged by sleep is all the labor of the day performed, and that
no labor is so taxing upon human muscles that it cannot be performed
longer without fatigue when the breakfast is omitted.

That this is possible came to me as a great surprise and in this way: a
farmer with a large assortment of ailments came to me for relief through
drugs. He was simply advised to take coffee mornings, rest mainly during
forenoons, and when a normal appetite and power to digest would come he
would be able to work after resuming his breakfasts. This man, who was
more than fifty years old, was the first manual laborer to be advised to
observe a morning fast.

Several months after, he came to me with news that his ailing had all
departed, and that he had been able to do harder work on his coffee
breakfasts than ever before with breakfasts of solids. And if he so
worked with power during forenoons, why not others? Why not all?

This no-breakfast plan was so contagious that I was not long in finding
that farmers in all directions were beginning to go to their labors with
much less food in their stomachs than had been their wont, and in all
cases with added power of muscle.

Only recently three farmers went into the field one hot morning to
cradle oats, the most trying of all work on the farm; two of them had
their stomachs well filled with hearty foods. With profuse sweating and
water by the quart because of the chemical heat arising from both
digestion and decomposition, these toiled through the long hours with
much weariness. The third man had all his strength for the swinging of
the cradle, the empty stomach not even calling for water; with the
greatest ease he kept his laboring friends in close company and when the
noon hour came he was not nearly so tired as they.

A man who had been a great sufferer from indigestion, a farmer, found
such an increase of health and strength from omitting the morning meal
that he became able to cradle rye, a much heavier grain than oats,
during an entire forenoon "on an empty stomach." Later he went from one
December to the following April on one daily meal, and not only with
ease, but with a gain in weight in addition. During these months this
man did all the work usual in farm-houses, besides riding several hours
over a milk route during the forenoons.

In this city resides a carpenter, formerly subject to frequent
sicknesses, who for the past five years has walked nearly a mile to the
shop where he is employed without even as much as a drink of water for
breakfast; and this not only without any sicknesses, but with an
increase in weight of fifteen pounds also.

More than a dozen years ago a farmer who was not diseased in any way,
but who had been in the habit of eating three times a day at a
well-spread table, and at mid-forenoon taking a small luncheon for
hunger-faintness, omitted his breakfast and morning luncheon, and has
been richly rewarded since then in escaping severe colds and other
ailings. He conclusively felt that his forenoon was the better half of
the day for clear-headedness and hard labor; he has added nearly a score
of pounds to his weight, and his case has been a wonder to all his
farmer friends, who see only starvation in cutting down brain and
needless stomach taxing.

I must now ask the reader to bear with me while I apply the principles
of this new hygiene with a good deal of reiteration, trying to vary them
in utterance as far as possible. The need of daily food is primarily a
matter of waste and supply, the waste always depending upon the amount
of loss through the general activities, manual labor being the most
destructive.

Across the street from where I live a new house is being built: for
many days during the chilly, windy month of March several men have been
engaged high in the air, handling green boards, studs, and joists for
ten hours each day; and yet these men are not eating more food daily
than hundreds of brain-workers who never have general exercise. The
workmen across the street eat to satisfy hunger; the brain-workers, to
satisfy the sense of relish; and the meals of the latter are habitually
in excess of the real demands because of wasted bodies.

In spite of the apparent overeating of the brain-worker, I believe the
farmer and the manual laborer break down at an earlier age, for the
reason that they overwork and generally eat when too tired to digest
fully: the farmer is rarely content to do one day's work in one day when
the crop season invites him to make the most of fair days.

With successes rapidly multiplying in all directions within my circuit,
the desire became urgent for some way to make my new hygiene known to
the public. My first thought was to get some eminent divine interested
through a cure that would compel him to a continual talk as to how he
became saved.

At a great denominational meeting in Chicago I chanced to hear a
splendid address from a sallow-faced professor of a divinity school, the
Rev. Dr. G. W. N.; and after a great deal of reflection I resolved,
without consulting him, to write him a series of letters on health
culture, hoping that he would become so immediately interested as to
permit me a complete unfolding of my theory and practice.

I began the series, taking all the chances to be considered a crank;
they were continued until the end without response, when later I
received a brief note with sarcasm in every line. At least my letters
had been read; for he informed me that he had no confidence in my
theory, giving me a final summing up with his estimate that there were
more "cranks" in the medical profession than in any other. I was not in
the least cast down at this long-range estimate, since I had become
quite used to close-at-hand ridicule.

There was before me the unknown time when a still more eminent D. D.
would both accept and practise my theory, and also give the world his
estimate in an elaborate preface to a book that in the fulness of time
the ways opened to me to write and have published.

I was sent for by a man who had become a moral and physical wreck, his
body being reduced to nearly a skeleton condition from consumption. As
he was taking an average of two quarts of whiskey per week, I accepted
the charge of his case with reluctance.

I was not able in any way to change his symptoms for the better; there
had been no hint of hunger for many weeks, and the mere effort to
swallow or even taste the most tempting dainties was painful to witness.
He was taken with a severe pain in his side, which was fully relieved
with the hypodermic needle, and there followed several hours of general
comfort and no desire for the alcoholic. Seeing this I was strongly
impressed that by continuing the dosings for a time the seared stomach
might get into a better condition and the fast be followed by a natural
hunger.

This is what actually followed: in about a week the dosings were reduced
to mere hints, and without any desire for stimulants there came a desire
for broiled steak and baked potatoes, which were taken with great
relish. Thence on this was mainly the bill of fare, and the half-filled
bottle remained on his table _untouched_, undesired; and in time there
were added more than a score of pounds to his wasted body.

Now it chanced that this regenerative work was seen day after day by his
friend, who was badly in need of an all-round treatment to meet the
needs of his case; he was a man of keen intellect, of real ability of
both mind and muscle. Becoming deeply interested in the theory behind
the miracle he saw unfolding day after day, and all the more because of
a total extinction of the drink-habit that was deep seated through long
duration, he began to omit his morning meals.

He saw more than his own case. He had been a manager of book agencies,
and when he found also his desire for the cigar undergoing a rapid
decline, he became possessed with the idea that a book might be written
on the subject. The time came when he could sit down in the office of
the Henry Bill Publishing Company, Norwich, Conn., a picture of health,
to interview Mr. Charles C. Haskell on the subject of publishing a
book. Mr. Haskell had known him in less healthful years, and he
marvelled at the change.

I had duly suggested, and with great emphasis, that no publisher would
listen to him unless he were sick enough to be interested in the theory
and would give a test by actual trial. He found Mr. Haskell in very low
health. Experts had sent him on a tour through Europe in search of that
health he failed to find; his body was starving on three meals a day
that were not digested, and he began to arrange his affairs with
reference to a near-at-hand breakdown.

To this man was made such an appeal as men are rarely able to make,
because a regenerated life was also vocal in utterance. To him a miracle
seemed to have been wrought, and he listened to each word as if to a
reprieve from a death seemingly inevitable.

As there was no disease of the stomach, it required only a few days for
Mr. Haskell to acquire so much of new life that he felt as one born
again, and a week had not passed before I had his earnest request to put
my hygiene into a book, he taking all chances of failure.

He began to advise all ailing friends to give up their breakfasts or to
fast until natural hunger came, getting many marvellous results. One of
his first thoughts was to have the forthcoming book introduced by some
eminent divine who could write through the inspiration of experience.

In a visit to Norwich of that evangelist of world-wide eminence, George
F. Pentecost, D. D., then of London, Eng., the opportunity came, and
for a case of "special conversion" he was made the guest of Mr. Haskell.
He was easily persuaded to the system, and his need is expressed in the
following from the introduction of _The True Science of Living_, which
was actually written without his having read a single line of the
manuscript.

"Taking the theory upon which this system of living is based into
account--and even to my lay mind it seemed most reasonable--and the
testimony which I personally received from both men and women, delicate
and biliously strong, workingmen, merchants, doctors, and preachers,
delicate ladies for years invalided and in a state of collapse, and some
who had never been ill, but were a hundred per cent. better for living
without breakfast, _I resolved to give up my breakfast_. I pleaded at
first that it might be my luncheon instead, for I have all my life
enjoyed my breakfast more than any other meal. But no! it was the
breakfast that must go. So on a certain fine Monday morning I bade
farewell to the breakfast-room. For a day or two I suffered slight
headaches from what seemed to me was the want of food; but I soon found
that they were just _the dying pains of a bad habit_. After a week had
passed I never thought of wanting breakfast; and though I was often
present in the breakfast-rooms of friends whom I was visiting, and every
tempting luxury of the breakfast was spread before me, I did not desire
food at all, feeling no suggestion of hunger. Indeed now, after a few
months, the thought of breakfast never occurs to me. I am ready for my
luncheon (or breakfast if you please) at one o'clock, but am never
hungry before that hour.

"As for the results of this method of living, I can only relate them as
I have personally experienced them:

"1. I have not had the first suggestion of a sick headache since I gave
up my breakfast. From my earliest boyhood I do not remember ever having
gone a whole month without being down with one of these attacks, and for
thirty years, during the most active part of my life, I have suffered
with them oftentimes, more or less, every day for a month or six weeks
at a time, and hardly ever a whole fortnight passed without an acute
attack that has sent me to bed or at least left me to drag through the
day with intense bodily suffering and mental discouragement.

"2. I have gradually lost a large portion of my surplus fat, my weight
having gone down some twenty pounds, and my size being reduced by
several inches at the point where corpulency was the most prominent; and
I am still losing weight and decreasing in size.

"3. I find that my skin is improving in texture, becoming softer, finer,
and more closely knit than heretofore. My complexion and eyes have
cleared, and all fulness of the face and the tendency to flushness in
the head have disappeared.

"4. I experience no fulness and unpleasantness after eating, as I so
often did before. As a matter of fact, though I enjoy my meals (and I
eat everything my appetite and taste call for) as never before, eating
with zest, I do not think I eat as much as I used to do; but I am
conscious of better digestion; my food does not lie so long in my
stomach, and that useful organ seems to have gone out of the
gas-producing business.

"5. I am conscious of a lighter step and a more elastic spring in all my
limbs. Indeed, a brisk walk now is a pleasure which I seek to gratify,
whereas before the prescribed walk for the sake of exercise was a
horrible bore to me.

"6. I go to my study and to my pulpit on an empty stomach without any
sense of loss of strength mentally or physically--on the other hand,
with freshness and vigor which is delightful. In this respect I am quite
sure that I am in every way advantaged."

Rev. George Sherman Richards, after more than fifteen years of frequent
severe headaches that were supposed to be due to heredity, has had
entire freedom during the five years of the No-breakfast Plan. He can
hardly be surpassed as a picture of perfect health.

One of the first prominent converts who finally surrendered to Mr.
Haskell, whose persistence was beyond fatigue, was the editor of the
Norwich, Conn., _Bulletin_, a special friend. There was no want of
conviction on his part, but the evil day to begin the morning fast was
continually postponed. Finally, one morning when he was specially busy
and charged with impatience, the beaming and hopeful face of Mr. Haskell
appeared. Said the busy man, "Mr. Haskell, if you will walk right out
of that door, I will promise you to begin tomorrow morning to do without
breakfasts." Mr. Haskell walked out--the breakfasts were given up, and
some years later I was personally informed that he believed that his
life had been saved thereby.

[Illustration: REV. GEORGE SHERMAN RICHARDS,

Rector of Christ Church, Meadville, Pa.]

One of the expedients was to send a circular about the book to every
foreign missionary of every denomination, and as a result one of these
fell into the hands of Rev. W. E. Rambo, in India. He had become a mere
shadow of his former self from ulcerated bowels, the sequel of a badly
treated case of typhoid fever. For seven months there had been daily
movements tinged with blood; the appetite was ravenous, and large meals
were taken without any complainings from the stomach. Before a
well-spread table his desire to eat would become simply furious, and it
was indulged regardless of quality and quantity. His brain system had
become so exhausted that reason and judgment had no part in this
hurricane of hunger.

There were seven successive physicians in this case, some of them with
many titles. The first one he called on reaching New England cut his
food down to _six bland meals daily_. All of them had tried to cure the
offending ulcers by dosings. Think whether bleeding ulcers on the body
would get well with their tender surfaces subjected to the same
grinding, scratching process from bowel rubbish!

He was in condition on his arrival to lose six pounds during the first
week of six "bland" daily meals. After reading the _True Science of
Living_ he discharged his physician and came under my personal care.
These ulcers were treated with the idea of giving them the same rest as
if each had been the end of a fractured bone. To relieve pain, to hold
the bowel still, and to abolish the morbid hunger, a few doses with the
hypodermic needle were a seeming necessity.

In less than two weeks this starving man of skin and bones was relieved
of all symptoms of disease, and there seemed a moderate desire for food
of the nourishing kind. Less than two weeks were required for all those
ulcers to become covered with a new membrane: but for full three weeks
only those liquid foods were given that had no rubbish in them to prove
an irritant to the new, delicate membrane covering the ulcers. For a
time after the third week there was only one light daily meal, with a
second added when it seemed safe to take it.

In a little more than three months there was a gain of forty-two and a
half pounds of flesh, as instinct with new, vigorous life as if freshly
formed by the divine hand. My last word from this restored man was after
he, his wife, and four children had been back in India for a year and a
half, where they were all living on the two-meal plan without any
sicknesses, and he had a class of one hundred and sixty native boys on
the same plan.

Who can fail to see the science and the sense to relieve all diseases
of the digestive tract? There are no cases of hemorrhoids not malignant
in character, in which total relief will not be the result if fasts are
long enough; no cases of anal fistula that will not finally close if
they can have that rest from violence that is their only need; and
equally all ulcers and fissures that make life a history of torture.

No case with structural disease of any part of the digestive tract not
malignant has yet come under my care in which there has not been a cure,
or in which there has not been a cure in sight. Through a fast we may
let the diseased parts in the digestive tract rest as we would a broken
bone or wound on the body.

Several missionaries have regained health on these new lines, who have
returned to preach and practise a larger gospel than before. One
returned from the Congo region of Africa with such wreckage of health as
to make any active service impossible. Mr. Haskell met him in New York,
and in time he returned with twenty-four missionaries, all as converts
to the new gospel of health, and to have that sustained health only
possible through a larger obedience to the laws of God "manifest in the
flesh"--obedience that takes into account the moral science, the physics
and the chemistry of digestion.

These and those others who have had their lives redeemed from lingering
death through the simple, easy ways of Nature never suffer their
enthusiasm to wane. Not to volunteer aid when unintentional suicide is
going on seems nothing less than criminal.

As a means to better health the utility of the morning fast is beyond
estimate. In all other modes of health culture there is a great deal of
time consumed in certain exercises that are certain to be given up in
time. What the busy world requires is a mode to gain and maintain the
health that requires neither time nor thought--one that is really
automatic.

We arise in the morning with our brain recharged by sleep, and we go at
once about our business. If we take a walk or go to the gymnasium, we
simply waste that much time, and we also lessen the stored-up energy by
whatever of effort is called out. We can skip the dumb-bells and perform
any other kind of exercise that is good for the health; and always with
the certainty that we shall have more strength for the first half of the
day if none is wasted in this way. As a matter of mere enjoyment, walks
in fresh air are beneficial, but not as an enforced exercise for the
reason of health.

For the highest possibilities for a day of human service there must be a
night of sound sleep; and then one may work with muscle or with mind
much longer without fatigue if no strength is wasted over untimely food
in the stomach, no enforced means to develop health and strength. When
one has worked long enough to become generally tired there should be a
period of rest, in order to regain power to digest what shall be so
eaten as to cause the brain the least waste of its powers through
failure to masticate.

One need not always wait until noon to eat the first meal. Those in good
health have found that they can easily go till noon before breaking the
fast; but in proportion as one is weak or ailing the rule should be to
stop all work as soon as fatigue becomes marked, and then rest until
power to digest is restored. To eat when one is tired is to add a burden
of labor to all the energies of life, and with the certainty that no
wastes will be restored thereby.

For the highest efforts of genius, of art, of the simplest labors of the
hands, the forenoon with empty stomach and larger measure of stored-up
energy of the brain is by far the better half of the day; and, more than
this, it is equally the better for the display of all the finer senses
of the tastes, the finer emotions of soul life. In addition to
these--and what is vastly more important--it is by far the better half
of the day for the display of that energy whereby disease is cured. All
this with no power lost in any special exercise for the health!

The time to stop the forenoon labor is when the need to rest has become
clearly apparent; and there must be rest before eating, to restore the
energy for digestion. This always determines Nature's time when the
first meal shall be taken, and not the hour of the day.

This is especially important to all who are constitutionally weak or
have become disabled through ailings or disease. Disappointments have
come to hundreds who have given up breakfasts, because of the mistaken
idea that they must wait till noon before breaking the fast, and hence
had become too tired to digest; and therefore experienced a loss rather
than a gain from the untimely noon meals.

The desire for morning food is a matter of habit only. Morning hunger is
a disease under culture, and they who feel the most need have the most
reason to fast into higher health. They who claim that their breakfasts
are their best meals; that they simply "cannot do one thing" until they
have eaten, are practically in line with those who must have their
alcoholics before the wheels can be started.

Now it has been found by the experience of thousands that by wholly
giving up the morning meal all desire for it in time disappears, which
could hardly be the case if the laws of life were thereby violated; and
the habit once fully eradicated is rarely resumed.

To give up suddenly the use of alcoholics or of tobacco in any of its
forms is to call out loudest protests from the morbid voices that have
been kept silent by those soothing powers; and yet no one would accept
those loud cries as indicating an actual physiological need. The
difficulties arising from giving up the morning meals--even as those
from giving up the morning grog--are an exact measure of the need that
they shall be given up in order that health, and not disease, shall be
under culture.

I once heard a Rev. Mrs. tell a large audience of ministers that for
more than a week she spent most of her forenoons in bed to endure better
the headaches and other angry, protesting voices that were averse to the
no-breakfast plan. She won her case, and thence on a hint of headache or
other morbid symptoms was a matter of humiliation and fasting, with
prayer for forgiveness and for greater moral strength against the
temptations of relish.

With many people the breaking of the breakfast habit costs only less of
will-power than is called out by attempts to break the alcoholic or
tobacco habit; but by persistence a complete victory is certain for all,
and the forenoons become a luxury of power in reserve.

Now, I must warn all that very many persons who adopt the No-breakfast
Plan are disappointed, because they have become chronic in the ways of
unwitting sin: they are like thin-soiled farms long-cropped without soil
culture. Harvests in either case can only come by the study and practice
of the laws of nutrition.

The besetting sin against all such ailing mortals, the lines of whose
lives are frequently of the hardest, is that the friends all oppose
cutting down the daily food from the dreadfully mistaken impression that
weakness and debility from disease are the measure of the need to eat,
not the measure of the inability to digest.

Scores of times I have been written to by this class of patients as to
their troubles from friends in this way. Scores of times I have been
consulted as to the safety of this method in daily living for the old,
as if it were a tax upon the constitutional powers to stop sinning
against them! As well ask whether one may get too old as to make it
dangerous to cut down daily whiskey or daily labor that is clearly
beyond the reasonable use of the powers.

Those who are the victims of chronic diseases and have become greatly
enfeebled by overwork of body, mind, or stomach, will have to work out
their salvation with most discouragingly slow progress; but not to work,
not to try, is to invite the processes of disease culture.

Now, as to the time when that first meal of the day shall be taken.
Since the best meal of the day in all America with the great majority of
the people is at noon, this time may well be selected as the most
fitting. Since the man of muscle loses no time in taking his breakfast,
he should be able with good sense to rest an hour before this noon meal.

Those whose general energies give out earlier in the morning and do not
care to have general meals prepared in advance of the usual hour, can
put in the time in the best possible way by resting into power of relish
and digestion, the evil of eating when tired being that the exhausted
feeling is only increased.

Now think what forenoons may be had with no time lost over breakfasts,
none in thinking about the health or in doing anything for it, and not
only to have the best and strongest use of the reason, judgment, and
muscles, but also to have the best possible conditions for the cure of
ailings! Think, too, what it would be to the mothers of the land not to
have any need to go into their kitchens until the time to prepare the
noon meal arrived!

Can children while growing rapidly do without breakfasts? They certainly
can without a hint of discomfort, and be all the better for it in every
way.

A few months ago I spent some hours in Illinois, where the no-breakfast
plan had been practised for two years. When the plan was begun there was
a pale, delicate mother of four children, who was enduring a life that
had no cheer. During the first year the battle was a severe one, not a
little aggravated by the assurance of all sympathetic friends that
resulting evil was making its mark on all the lines of expression; but
health with its life and color finally came to silence the uttered
disapproval.

There was a boy in the home who was subject to the severest headaches
every week, and who was much wasted in his body when he began: he had
become robust and wholly relieved of all his ailings. There was a plump,
rosy-cheeked girl of fourteen who for a year had taken only one daily
meal, and yet a better nourished body I never saw.

Now in this family the only warm, general meal, and this a plain one,
was at noon. The evening meal was entirely of bread and butter taken
without even a sitting at the table. What happy, healthy children they
were! And the mother was in a great deal better health to do all the
work of the kitchen: work, she strongly asserted, which was not nearly
half of what it formerly was. For her there was a cure, a great increase
of strength, and a great reduction of the most taxing of all the duties
of the home-life.

If there is such a thing as an attack of disease, it cannot occur in the
forenoon when there is an empty stomach and all the powers are at their
best for resisting disease; and where children are fed as these are,
disease, acute or chronic, is only a remote possibility.

I belong to a family of seven; the oldest is beyond seventy, the
youngest beyond fifty. This No-breakfast Plan has been very closely
adhered to with all for not less than twelve years, and during this time
not one of us has had any acute sickness; and I am not aware that any
have diseases of the chronic kind.

    The accompanying illustration is that of Mrs. E. A. Quiggle,
    sister of the Author, after twelve years' trial of The
    No-breakfast Plan.

[Illustration: MRS. E. A. QUIGGLE,

Chicago, Ill.]




IX.


The utility of eating with thoroughness is strongly illustrated in the
following cases:

Mr. Horace Fletcher, the author and traveller, took to the
one-daily-meal plan to cut down his abnormal weight, having the patience
to masticate all sense of taste from each mouthful before swallowing. I
saw him after he had been on this plan for some months: there had been a
weight loss of some forty pounds; a nasal catarrh of many years had been
cured, and he strongly asserted that in every way he felt himself
twenty-five years younger.

He had been living a week on baked potatoes for experimental reasons
when I met him, and without experiencing any morbid sensations: a more
perfect specimen of physical health I never gazed upon. To all
dyspeptics who are willing to work for their health through pains and
patience, his little work, _Glutton or Epicure_, is strongly
recommended.

A dyspeptic from Vermont came to me who for ten years had eaten three
hearty meals daily, none of which had ever satisfied his hunger. He was
in a very low mental state when he came, and feeble in body: for fully
ten years both himself and physician had held the stomach accountable
for all its complainings, and with no thought of avoidable cause.

I put him on one meal a day, as there was still some power of digestion,
and with the following list for the daily bill of fare: baked potatoes
well buttered, bread and butter, beans dressed with butter, fish or lamb
chops, and rice or oatmeal only if strongly desired; all sugar foods
debarred, and no drinks except water as thirst called for it between the
meals. The constipated bowels were permitted their own times for action.
The mouthfuls were small and far apart--like dashes between words--not
less than forty-five minutes were spent in masticating. Very soon there
was a general rousement of new life in every way. His first surprise was
in an unwonted sense of relish and a complete sating of hunger long
before he had eaten the old-time amounts.

There was a fresh revelation to me in this, as I had not before been so
impressed that by slow eating the hunger-spell is also dissipated in
part by time, and hence there is much less danger of eating to excess.
Hunger comes in part from habit, and it is appeased, with or without
eating, with equal completeness. The hunger-habit can be trained to come
at almost any fixed time.

Not long since I read of a farmer who kept his horses in apparently
perfect condition on one feeding, and only at night: they had become so
trained that they had no desire for food until their labors were over.
At night they both ate and rested, and made good the waste of the day;
they were fully nourished and rested by morning, and could labor all the
forenoon without loss of energy diverted to digestion: at noon they
would rest--become strong for the labors of the day.

There can be no doubt, I think, that the strongest sense of hunger at
the regular eating-time could be dissipated by a fast not longer in
duration than that of an ordinary meal-time.

My patient's bowels gave no hint of their locality until the eighteenth
day, when they acted with little effort; on the twenty-fourth day again
in a perfect way, and thereafter daily. The mind became ecstatic through
perfect relief from mental and physical depression; there were no wants
for other than those simple foods, and at the end of a month he left me
with new views as to Nature's power of selection to meet her needs and
of the vast utility of using both time and food to dissipate hunger.

The waste with most people is so small that the cost of the food, the
cost of time in preparation, could be reduced to a startling fraction if
the need could be actually known, and the pleasures of the palate
increased by an inverse ratio. There is no redemption for women on the
earth who have the care of kitchens except through simpler, smaller
meals--meals so very far apart that there shall be a maximum of the
hunger-sense of relish and the resulting maximum of power to convert
them into tissues instinct with life.

It may be that the waste is so very trifling, especially with
brain-workers, that one may be a vegetarian, fruitarian, or even an
eater of pork, without positive violence to practical physiology. There
is this further very practical consideration, that when Nature is so
fairly dealt with that she can speak in natural tones she will call only
for those foods easily available along geographical lines.

There is this to be said about fruits, that all those containing acids
decompose the gastric juice, as they all contain potash salts in union
with fruit acids. As soon as they reach the stomach the free
hydrochloric acid of the gastric juice unites with the potash, setting
the fruit acid free to irritate the stomach. There is never any desire
for acid fruits through real hunger, especially those of the hyperacid
kinds: they are simply taken to gratify that lower sense--relish.

The tropical fruits are without acids, and therefore are well adapted to
a class of people who have only the least use for muscle and brains.
Acid fruits can only be taken with apparent impunity by the young and
old, who can generate gastric juice copiously. Because of the general
impression that they are healthful and no tax, human stomachs are
converted into cider-mills at will, regardless of between meal-times. By
their ravishing flavor and apparent ease of digestion apples still play
an important part in the "fall of man" from that higher estate, the
Eden without its dyspepsia.

What shall we eat? The fig-leaved savage under his bread-fruit tree, the
fur-clad Eskimo in his ice-hut, need not be asked: the needed food is in
all due supply with little cost of muscle and less of mind--and he has
no mental condition that can disturb the digestion.

The simpler waste-restoring foods have a flavor of their own that needs
little reinforcement if developed by due mastication and with adequate
hunger. In my own case butter duly salted seems to be my only natural
appetizer aside from hunger; and yet I must own that at times new honey
has a wonderful effect on the mouth-glands.

The difference between eating from hunger and mere relish, as fruits and
the various sweetened foods are eaten, is a new study in dietetics, and
one more important can scarcely be conceived. It can hardly be
intelligently studied without taking into due account this new
physiology. With rarest exceptions the need of food is estimated by the
mere pleasure that comes from relish--that kind of relish that is
evolved from the pies, puddings, ice creams, the last course in Sunday
dinners, never taken until the limits of stomach expansion are nearly
reached.




X.


Some of the external evidences of that general regeneration which comes
through Nature will now be given. We will study the human face as we
study the earth when the favoring conditions of Spring rouse all Nature
to newness of life. The face shall be our human landscape.

I select a face in which the eyes are dull from debility, in which there
is no sparkle of soul, and beneath are the dark venus-hanging clouds.
The face has a dull, lifeless cast; the veins are all enlarged from
debility, and cover the larger arteries as with a mourner's pall, save
where there are patches as of clouds on fire, where disease of the skin
enlivens the drear landscape. There are pimples large and small, some
with overflowing volcanoes; there are no lines of expression: these are
changed to lines of morbid anatomy. We listen, and there are no echoes
of departed joys; look as we will, and we see no evidence of the
existence of a soul.

The ultimate of this picture is death from unrecognized suicide; death,
a slow dying to every sense that made life worth living. There is this
about these deaths that go on through the months and years: they
exaggerate the worst instincts of the soul as it is dragged down--down
through brain-wasting largely avoidable if only understood.

The instant result of a total suspension of the use of the brain power
in the digestive tract is the evolution of life: new life is sent to the
remotest cell as by an electric charge. The nutrient vessels of the eye
tone down in size, and there is polish, sparkle where there was only
dimness; and on the face the venus clouds, black and red, begin to
disappear; the toning of the veins condenses the skin, and thereby the
ruddy arteries are uncovered, and a color that has life appears; the
pimples, the hillocks, even have a brighter look as they slowly shrink
from sight. Finally, the skin becomes of a plush-like texture, soft,
condensed, and with tints that compare as the tints of flowers with the
faded colors of the house-painter, or as the matchless tint and plush of
the perfect peach to the spotted, colorless, wilted, degenerated
representative awaiting the garbage-barrel; and the cherry lips, the
cherry gums, and the whiter teeth--Nature does not match them
otherwheres.

Landscape gardening upon the human face has the largest, most inspiring
possibilities; and there are no eyes so dull, no faces so void of light
and life, no skin degraded to a parchment, for a public display of an
assorted collection of evidences of physical poverty, in which these
changes to a higher life are not in some degree easily possible.

Face culture becomes of the profoundest interest when it is realized
that whatever there is in eyes and lines of expression that reveals a
soul in higher life, whatever there is in softness and delicacy of
texture, in color that is alive with life, is only the external
revelations of the higher life within. Nature is always at work over her
waste places, whether about the roots in the mouth, or in the depths of
the organs; and the aches, the pains of the living, and the agonies of
the dying are only evidences of the earnestness and persistence of her
efforts to right all her wrongs.

In what ways are drugs available in this kind of landscape culture; how
sent through the crystalline structures of the eye with clearing effect;
how to polish the retina and the surfaces to a sparkle? What drugs for
such culture? And yet the materia medica needs a hoist to place it on
the shelf. These external changes that become clearly apparent to even
dull eyes are the changes that also go on in the very depths of diseased
structure, in all the special senses, in all those higher instincts and
tastes that make man the best for self, for home, State and Nation--the
image of his Creator. Is this high estate ever reached through dosage?

Let this matter be again considered. In the days of the lancet, roots
and herbs, of bleedings and sweatings, of fevers without water for
parched tongues, throats, and stomachs, Nature had no part in the cure
of disease in the professional or lay mind, except in rare instances in
which there were those specially gifted with insight as well as
eyesight.

Now such barbarism was inflicted with intense force of conviction, and
it was patiently endured with the largest faith. When a mere child I was
a witness of the bleeding treatment upon my mother of saintly memory,
and my child hands carried into the back yard nearly a quart of blood
drawn for a bilious attack that lasted but a few days.

There is this to be taken into account in the dose treatment of
diseases--that most cases recover regardless of the time of treatment,
even whether it is the most crucifying or whether there is no dosing.
Therefore, the good effect of dosing is at best a matter of hazy
inference, where real evidence is not possible. The lack of uniformity
in the character and times of doses for similar diseases is a burlesque
on science. What would a text-book on chemistry be worth with nothing
more in the way of demonstrative evidence than we find in our materia
medica in the summing up of the "medical properties" of drugs.

In modern times homoeopathy has come in as a protest against the drawing
of blood and the administration of drugs that corrode. For a form of
skin disease sulphur has been given by the teaspoonful by my brethren of
the "regular" school; with equal faith, my brethren of the homoeopathic
school will give the fraction of a grain whose denominator will cross an
ordinary page: at which extreme is the science of dosage, if any; or
where between? I can hardly resist the conclusion that faith in dosage
is, by as much, inability for the deduction of science.

"I know whereof I believe," is the language of Science. "I believe," is
the language of credulity--with all the ways back to cause too hazy for
the perception of even the assuring guide-boards. Said that prince of
American humorists, Artemus Ward, "I have known a man who drank one
drink of whiskey every day, and yet lived to be one hundred years old;
but do not believe, therefore, that by taking two drinks a day you will
live to be two hundred years old." "I have known a man who had not a
single tooth, and yet he could play a bass drum better than any man I
ever knew;" but do not infer that the pulling of sound teeth will aid in
bringing out all the possibilities of harmony, melody, and delicacy of
tone of this particular instrument of song without words. I have seen a
man seemingly in perfect health at one hundred years old who had eaten
three meals a day; but may I infer that on four meals a day he would
have lived to be one hundred and thirty-three and a third years old? A
hundred times I have been told by physicians that they have had the best
results from certain drugs; but in not one instance was any reason for
their faith advanced.

If I am to be governed by impressions as to the utility of what I may do
for the sick, what is more impressive than to draw blood as they of old
did, with recovery in most cases? Have we reduced the mortality of
disease by a change in dosage? If so, how much, apart from the better
sanitary conditions of living and from those involved in the care of the
sick?

I can easily see or believe there is utility in clearing the digestive
tract at an early date in the case of severe sickness; I know that
stomach and bowels are as machines run by brain power; but beyond this
the materia medica is summed up in this way, "I dose my sick: they get
well: therefore my treatment is successful; or if they die, it is the
providence of God"--and with no thought that it may have been the
providence of bad treatment.

Men and brethren of the medical profession, you believe me a heretic in
all my professional modes, and only endure me because I do not carry
violent hands; but you would bar the sick-room from the bleeder of old.
I may attack the lancet, the herbs, the ground-roots, whose doses were
only as kindling-wood and sawdust a little more refined, and you will
say "Amen" with emphasis. "But we, we live in a more enlightened age:
our doses are more refined"--yes, but you administer them with the same
force of conviction as to their utility in the cure of disease, and with
little thought as to just why they are given and how they act.

It is my present conception that feeding the sick as now very generally
practised will be held, in a more enlightened age, as we now hold the
lancet of a darker age--a twin relic of barbarism; and there will be
only wonder that attempts were ever made to convert the lower bowel
into a temporary stomach _thirty feet away_.

How discriminating this deputy stomach that it selects the predigested
food-ration from its unutterable lower bowel involvements; sending it
pure and undefiled as ready-made flesh into the blood, only requiring it
to be placed as bricks to a wall. Fortunately, these lower stomachs are
not subject to nausea no matter how capable of otherwise rebelling, as
they so often do.

Predigested foods! If they nourish the sick, why not feed the well; why
not abolish our kitchens at an immense saving in the time, expense, and
worry of cooking, and live on them at an immense saving of the tax of
digestion and the indigestive processes? Brethren of the medical
profession, make haste to let the world know when you have found a case
in which you have made use of the lower bowel so to nourish the sick
body that it did not waste while the cure was going on.




THE FASTING-CURE.




XI.

NOTES AND PRESS COMMENTS ON VOLUNTARY FASTS.


The first voluntary protracted fast for the cure of chronic ailing to
reach the public prints as a matter of interesting news occurred in the
case of Mr. C. C. H. Cowan, of Warrensburg, Ill., early in 1899. He had
been on the two-meal plan for a time, and wishing for something more
radical wrote to me as to his entering upon a fast. I probably wrote him
as I now find it necessary to write all who feel that fasts are
necessary and cannot have my personal care, "Go on a fast and stick to
it until hunger comes or until your friends begin to suffer the pangs of
sympathetic starvation; then compromise with the sin of ignorance by
eating the least that will bring peace to their troubled souls."

The results were summed up by the _Morning-Herald Dispatch_, Decatur,
Ill., April 16, 1899:

    "A few years ago Dr. Tanner, in New York City, fasted for forty
    days and forty nights, and all the world wondered. Up to that
    time the feat was considered impossible. From day to day the
    papers told of his actions and his condition, and the entire
    people became deeply interested in the performance. Medical men
    and scientists became interested in the performance, and the
    laity watched the faster through curiosity. Tanner's
    accomplishment was considered marvellous by the medical
    profession and laymen alike, but Dr. Tanner has long since been
    a back number, and his performance is not now regarded as
    remarkable, although there are not many persons who would care
    to attempt the fast. Tanner was simply trying to prove that the
    thing could be done. He did it, and within a year the man who
    held the attention of the people of the country for forty days
    was a visitor to this city. What Tanner did has been more than
    accomplished by a Macon County man, but he went about his
    undertaking quietly, and the fact that he was fasting was known
    to only a few of his friends. The man is C. C. H. Cowan, of
    Warrensburg, and for forty-two days and nights he abstained from
    the use of food in solid or liquid form. He began his fast on
    March 2 and broke it on the evening of April 13 at supper-time.
    With the exception of the loss of thirty pounds of flesh, which
    materially changed his personal appearance, Mr. Cowan shows no
    ill-effects of his undertaking. When he began he weighed one
    hundred and sixty-five pounds, and when he quit he weighed one
    hundred and thirty-five pounds. Before his fast he was inclined
    to be fleshy, and now, while still in fairly good flesh, his
    clothing manifests a desire not to hold close communion with his
    body. Mr. Cowan was in the city Saturday, and some of his
    friends did not know him. He related his experience to some of
    them, but he did this cautiously, and with the oft-expressed
    hope that the papers would not devote any attention to the
    affair, because he was not seeking and did not want notoriety.
    At different times during his fast the _Herald-Dispatch_ has
    referred to the fact in short items. Cowan is a disciple of a
    Dr. Dewey, living at Meadville, Pa., who is an advocate of
    fasting as a means of curing many of the ills to which the body
    is heir. Dr. Dewey has many pamphlets touching the subject, and
    has also written some books for his belief, and his reasons have
    been made so plausible that a number of persons have coincided
    with him. Cowan says the efficacy of the treatment has been
    established in many instances, a fact that he can prove by ample
    testimony. During his long abstinence from food he had numerous
    letters and telegrams from Dr. Dewey, encouraging him in the
    undertaking. When asked why he had fasted, Cowan explained that
    for years he had suffered from chronic nasal and throat catarrh
    which would not yield to medical treatment. His appetite was
    splendid, and he ate many things that he really did not want. He
    read Dr. Dewey's ideas, and became convinced that his system
    needed general overhauling, and that this could be accomplished
    through faithful adherence to the theory of Dr. Dewey. One of
    these theories is to the effect that fasting rests the brain,
    which is ofttimes overworked as a result of heavy feeding. It is
    also supposed that the body throws off old mucous membrane of
    the stomach and bowels, and that these are immediately
    supplanted by new lining. Believing that he could get rid of his
    catarrhal trouble and get the new lining referred to, Cowan
    decided to fast, and without noise about the matter he
    commenced, and up to Thursday evening he did not allow a bite of
    food to pass his lips. The only thing that he took was water. Of
    this he did not drink much, and he claims that he suffered no
    pain or pangs of hunger. Looking at the matter now, it does not
    seem to have been much of an accomplishment. After he once got
    started he said it was an easy matter to carry out his plan
    except for the worry of his family and some of his friends. They
    thought that he was losing his mind and tried to induce him to
    relinquish his idea, but he took some of them under his wing and
    reasoned with them on the beauties of the treatment, expounded
    the strong points, gave them reasons, showed them testimony of
    others, and kept on fasting. When he began he had no idea that
    he would continue for forty days; but as he progressed he had no
    desire for food, and therefore did not desist. Thursday evening
    he began to feel hungry, and that night he ate a reasonably good
    supper. The return of hunger, according to his theories, was the
    signal of the return of health. He feels confident that his
    stomach has been relined, and for the present he knows that his
    catarrh has left him. He is a firm believer in the new method of
    curing bodily ailments, and says that during his fast he was
    able to be around the village of Warrensburg every day, and was
    able to perform his duties. His abstinence from food apparently
    has not weakened his constitution. Since breaking his fast he
    has partaken sparingly of food. Cowan's friends are very much
    interested in the recital of his experience."

It so chanced that during this fast much more than his ordinary business
came to him, and without the least inability to perform it. I saw him
several months later, and found his physical condition seemingly
perfect. He had found out that for the best working conditions a nap at
noon was better than even a light luncheon, and that one meal a day
taken after his business was over was the best practice. This fast was
not in the right locality to excite the attention it deserved.

The second voluntary fast was destined to reach the ends of the earth
through the public prints. The following appeared in the _New York
Press_ of June 6, 1899:

    "Twenty-eight days without nourishment and without letting up
    for a moment on the daily routine of his business is the
    unequalled record of Milton Rathbun, a hay and grain dealer at
    No. 453 Fourth Avenue, and living in Mount Vernon. He is a man
    of wealth, has many employes, and has been in the same business
    in this city for thirty-nine years.

    "He fasted because he wanted to reduce his weight, fearing that
    its gradual increase might bring on apoplexy. He succeeded in
    his efforts. He weighed two hundred and ten pounds when he
    stopped eating; when he resumed he tipped the scales at one
    hundred and sixty-eight pounds, a loss of forty-two pounds of
    flesh.

    "Mr. Rathbun's description of how he felt as the days and weeks
    wore along and the pounds of avoirdupois slipped away one by one
    is interesting. The remarkable point about it is that he
    continued his work and kept well. He gave his account of it
    yesterday to a reporter for _The Press_. Mr. Rathbun is known by
    the business men for blocks around his own place of business,
    and they all know of his fast.

    "Every day his friends would come in and talk to him about it.
    At first they told him he was foolish; that nobody could fast
    that length of time, much less continue his work without
    interruption. Then as the days went on and he kept up without a
    break they began to be frightened.

    "A crowd would gather about him every night at 6.30 o'clock,
    when he would leave his office, for that was his hour for
    weighing. Some days he would lose two or three pounds from the
    weight of the day before; some days only one, but always
    something. And as the record was scored up on the book each
    night his friends would shake their heads and warn him to
    beware.

    "Finally, on the fifteenth day, his friends and employes got
    together and made up their minds that something had to be done.
    They were afraid that Rathbun would die. They appointed a
    committee to wait on him in his office and beg him to eat
    something. The committee took dainties to Mr. Rathbun, told him
    their fears, and offered the good things to tempt him, but all
    to no purpose.

    "It was the night of April 23 that Mr. Rathbun took his last bit
    of nourishment. He made no attempt to eat a large meal in
    preparation for his fast. He ate his regular supply just as if
    he had meant to continue eating on the following day. Then for
    twenty-eight days he absolutely abjured all food. He drank
    water, but that was all. Before going to bed he would take a
    pint of Apollinaris.

    "Had he remained at his home in bed or taken perfect rest, his
    achievement would have been less remarkable. That is the course
    which always has been adopted by the professional fasters. Dr.
    Tanner, and the Italian, Succi, in their fasts were surrounded
    by attendants who allowed them scarcely to lift a hand, so that
    every ounce of energy might be conserved.

    "Rathbun pursued a course diametrically opposite to this. He
    worked, and worked hard. He came down earlier to his office and
    went away later than usual. He made no effort to save himself.
    On the contrary, he seemed determined to make his task as hard
    as possible. On four of his fast days he spent the afternoons in
    a dentist's chair, at which times his nerves were tried as only
    dentists know how to do it.

    "It was his idea to continue the fast until he began to feel
    hunger. After the first twenty-four hours his hunger
    disappeared, and he had no desire for food until the end of the
    fourth week, when the craving set in, and he immediately set
    about satisfying it in a moderate and careful manner. He
    consulted two physicians while the fast was going on, to see that
    he was suffering no injury that he could not appreciate himself.
    One was Dr. F. B. Carpenter, of Madison Avenue and thirty-eight
    Street, and the other, Dr. George J. Helmer, of Madison Avenue
    and Thirty-first Street. He saw Dr. Carpenter on the eighteenth
    and the twenty-first days, and Dr. Helmer on the twenty-fifth
    day. Both expressed surprise at his long fast and astonishment at
    his excellent condition.

    "Mr. Rathbun is fifty-four years old, and five feet six inches
    in height. He does not look more than forty years old, and he is
    as active as a man of that age. He says he never felt better
    than when he was fasting, and that he has experienced no bad
    effects of any kind, while, on the other hand, he has reduced
    his weight to a normal limit and removed all danger of apoplexy.

    "He got the idea of the fast from the new theory exploited by
    Dr. Edward Hooker Dewey, a practising physician of Meadville,
    Pa., who recommends fasting as a cure for many ailments, and
    advises all persons to go without breakfast and eat only two
    meals a day.

    "'I became intensely interested in this new system,' said Mr.
    Rathbun yesterday, 'and I decided to put it to a practical test.
    Dr. Dewey had said that he had many patients fasting all the way
    from ten to thirty and forty days, and I concluded that if it
    did them so much good it would be just the thing for me. So I
    tried it.

    "'On April 23 I ate my last meal, and from then until May 24 I
    had absolutely nothing to eat. I drank water, of course, for
    that is a matter of necessity. One cannot do without drink; but
    I took no nourishment. For the first twenty-four hours I was
    very hungry, and would have liked very much to take a square
    meal; but I resisted the temptation, and after the expiration of
    one day I had no desire to eat.

    "'I had been in the habit of getting to my office about 8; now I
    get there at 7. I generally had left at 5.30; I now stayed until
    6.30. I had been in the habit of taking an hour or an hour and a
    quarter for luncheon. The luncheon was now cut off, so I stayed
    in the office and worked. I sat there at my desk and put in a
    long, hard day's work, constantly writing.

    "'At night I drank a bottle of Apollinaris, and went to bed at
    8.30 and slept until 4 in the morning. I never enjoyed better
    sleep than in those four weeks. And I was in excellent condition
    as far as I could see in every other way. My mind was clear, my
    eye was sharper than usually, and all the functions were in
    excellent working order.

    "'I had many amusing experiences. I went to a dentist on the
    first day. I had some work requiring several hours' labor on the
    part of the dentist. I said nothing to the doctor on the first
    day. Four or five days afterward I kept a second appointment
    with the dentist, and he asked me how the teeth worked which he
    had fixed before. I said to him: "I haven't tried them yet."

    "'You can imagine the look of surprise on his face. When I told
    him that I was fasting, and had been since he had seen me
    before, he showed the greatest concern, and said he did not
    think I could go on with the dental work on account of the
    weakness of my nerves. He solicited me to go out and have just a
    bite of something. I refused, of course, and he continued the
    work. I visited him on two days after that until he had finished
    the work.

    "'The men in my employ were greatly concerned about me, and
    thought I would break down. I used to weigh every night before
    leaving the office, and as they saw my constant wearing away
    they became more and more frightened, and finally appointed a
    committee to wait on me. The committee was headed by my manager,
    who begged me to eat. He brought along some fine ripe cherries
    to tempt me. I told him I would not eat them for one thousand
    dollars, for I was interested thoroughly in the fast by that
    time and would not have stopped.

    "'After that they made no more attempts to stop the fast; but my
    friends all shook their heads, and said that when I started in
    to eat again I would find I was without a proper stomach.

    "'On the twenty-eighth day the hunger began to come on again,
    and I began to eat under the advice of Dr. Carpenter. On the
    twenty-ninth day I drank a little bouillon, and afterward from
    day to day increased the amount of food to the normal. I
    suffered no inconvenience.'

    "Mr. Rathbun says he is a firm believer in the no-breakfast
    system of hygiene advocated by Dr. Dewey, and that neither
    himself, his wife, nor any of the servants in his house eat
    breakfast, and as a result all are remarkably well. His two
    sons, one of whom was graduated at Harvard in 1896, and a
    second, who is still at Harvard, practise the no-breakfast
    system.

    "Just before beginning his fast Mr. Rathbun ordered a suit of
    clothes at his tailor's. He did not go for it until the end of
    his long fast. Being something of a practical joker, besides a
    man of great nerve, he walked into the tailor-shop and let the
    tailor try his new suit on to see if it was all right.

    "When he slipped on the coat the tailor stood aghast. There was
    apparently the same man he had measured twenty-eight days
    previously standing before him in perfect health, but as to
    dimensions not at all the same man.

    "'It doesn't fit any part of you,' said the tailor, after the
    suit had been tried on. In the tailor's book Rathbun's
    measurement was entered: 'Forty-three inches around the waist
    and forty-two around the chest.' When he went for his suit his
    measurements were thirty-eight around the waist and thirty-eight
    around the chest.

    "Dr. Dewey's theory, which led Rathbun to make his long fast, is
    that the brain is the centre of every mind and muscle energy, a
    sort of self-charging dynamo, with the heart, lungs, and all the
    other parts only as so many machines to be run by it; that the
    brain has the power of feeding itself on the less important
    parts of the body without loss of its own structure, and that as
    the operation of digestion is a tax on the brain, a long period
    of fasting gives the brain a rest, by which means the brain is
    able to build itself up, which means the upbuilding of the whole
    body.

    "In this way, it is asserted, the alcohol habit is cured and
    other diseases eradicated.

    "Dr. F. B. Carpenter said yesterday to a reporter for _The
    Press_ that he had not recommended Mr. Rathbun to take the fast,
    but had advised him while it was going on and after it was over.
    The doctor said he was inclined to believe there might be
    something in the no-breakfast system, as a great many persons
    eat and drink altogether too much.

    "Dr. Helmer said he had examined Rathbun on the twenty-fifth
    day, and had found him in surprisingly good condition."

Mr. Rathbun had been on the no-breakfast plan for several years, and he
was one of the first to write me after my book came out. It was not
without reason he feared apoplexy, for Ex-Gov. Flower, an over-weighted
man, had gone down to instant death though seemingly in perfect health
and in the prime of business energy and mental capacity. During his fast
my only trouble with him was in his drinking so much water without
thirst, thus greatly and needlessly adding to the work of the kidneys.

Mr. Rathbun was so disappointed over the skepticism of New York
physicians as to the reliability of the fast that he determined to
undergo a longer one under such surveillance as would enforce
conviction. He was mainly actuated, however, to go through the ordeal in
the interests of science.

Again I had trouble with him on the water question, wishing him to drink
only as thirst incited. He was differently advised by an eminent Boston
physician, who, taking a great interest in the case, wrote him that he
should have great care to drink certain definite amounts for the
necessary fluidity of the blood. I had to respond that thirst would duly
indicate this need; that in my cases of protracted fasts from acute
sicknesses not one had been advised to take even a teaspoonful of water
for such reasons; that at the closing days before recovery of such cases
there was only the least desire for water, and this with no indication
of need from the blood. Mr. Rathbun did not escape some trouble from
overworked kidneys, and he became convinced that my theory and practice
were more in line with physiology.

This fast was made a matter of daily record by the leading New York
journals, and he became such a subject of general interest that in
addition to his ordinary business he was greatly overtaxed, and was
compelled to give up the fast on the thirty-fifth day, in part from the
exhaustion of over-excitement.

This case was summed up as follows by the _New York Press_, February 27,
1900:

    "Milton Rathbun has ended his long fast.

    "After thirty-five days, in which solid food or any liquid other
    than water was a stranger to his palate, he became extremely
    hungry on Sunday night. At first he resisted the longing to eat
    and tried to sleep it off. But he awoke in a few hours hungrier
    than ever, and then he decided he had fasted as long as was good
    for him.

    "He ate a modest, light meal and went back to bed, only to awake
    still hungry. Then he ate an orange, and was asleep again in a
    jiffy. A bowl of milk and cream and crackers sufficed for his
    breakfast, and at noon yesterday he enjoyed his first hearty
    meal.

    "As he walked around the parlor of his home in Mount Vernon,
    lighter by forty-three pounds than he was on January 21, this
    man of fifty-five years and iron will said:

    "'I feel like a boy again. I think I could vault over a six-foot
    fence.'

    "Mrs. Rathbun herself knows what it is to fast. For five years
    such a thing as breakfast has been an unknown quantity in her
    house, save when guests were present or for the servants. To
    this abstinence Mrs. Rathbun attributes the curing of catarrh,
    from which she had suffered previously. And as she and her
    husband do, so do their two sons.

    "After the first few days of abstinence he had felt no desire to
    eat until Sunday evening. Then he became hungry--ravenously so.
    His first fast of a year ago--it was twenty-eight days then--had
    taught him that sleep took away the longing for food, and, too,
    he had said he would make his fast last forty days this time. So
    he went to bed and to sleep.

    "But he awoke at 11 o'clock; he was hungrier than ever, and he
    decided not to resist his inclination for food. Calling his wife
    he asked her for an orange, and ate it; then he took another.
    His next demand was for oysters, and a dozen large, juicy ones
    disappeared rapidly, to the accompaniment of five soda crackers.
    Then he drank about two-thirds of a cup of beef-tea, and some
    Oolong tea. His appetite was not sated by any means, but he knew
    the danger of overloading his stomach, so he stopped.

    "He soon was slumbering again, but he was wide awake at 2
    o'clock in the morning. And his hunger was with him still. He
    ate an orange to appease the craving, and again sought his
    pillow. He slept again until 6 o'clock, and then, breaking some
    crackers in a bowl of milk and cream, he ate again.

    "At noon a meal was served to the still hungry man. He began
    with a little clam-broth; then came half a dozen steamed clams,
    followed by a small portion of mock-turtle soup. Of a squab he
    ate one-half, and with it some canned pease and fried potatoes;
    while for dessert he had a little lemon ice.

    "'That was good,' he exclaimed, as he finished. The remark was
    unnecessary; the relish with which he had eaten was convincing
    testimony of his enjoyment. Asked why he had decided not to fast
    for the full forty days, he said:

    "'I ate just because I was hungry.'

    "Asked how the weather affected him, he said:

    "'When I began there was a spell of cold weather, and I found
    it rather hard to keep warm at night. But it soon passed away,
    and I made it a point to wear the same underclothing and outer
    garments as usual. Oh, yes; I did wear a different pair of
    trousers. I had them made five years ago, but they were so tight
    around the waist I could never wear them. They are as loose as
    can be now, however.'

    "'From a scientific standpoint,' said Professor R. Ogden Doremus
    yesterday, 'it is the most interesting and valuable experiment I
    have known. Mr. Rathbun is a man of great nerve force. The very
    fact that he attended to his business was what saved him, in
    keeping his mind away from the thought of food. He could not
    have done it had he been on exhibition or if he had remained at
    home. If he had been at sea, in an open boat, he could not have
    lasted more than ten days. He would have had nothing to think of
    but his hunger.'

    "Dr. George J. Helmer, who has given no little attention to Mr.
    Rathbun, said:

    "'I have examined him several times; I did so when his thirty
    days were up. Well, it was remarkable. It's a wonderful
    exhibition, that will attract the attention of the medical
    world. His heart is as clear as a bell and his kidneys are
    perfect. He is in absolutely rugged health. His temperature was
    normal, his eye clear, and to-day, upon examination, any
    insurance company would rate him as an A1 risk.'

    "Following is from the diary kept during his fast, and furnished
    by Milton Rathbun to _The Press_:

      "_First Day_, Jan. 22, 8.45 A. M.--Weight, 207 pounds; height, 5
      ft. 6-1/2 inches; chest measure, 43-1/2 inches; waist measure,
      43-1/2 inches; hip measure, 46-1/2 inches; calf measure, 17
      inches; biceps measure, 14 inches; forearm, 12 inches. 3 P. M.,
      feels well, but hungry. In the evening felt well, not being
      hungry or thirsty. Have taken no water.

      "_Tuesday_, Jan. 23.--Slept well until 6 A. M. Rested a while,
      then took sponge bath and rubdown. At 8.45 weighed 200 pounds.
      Feel good, but a little weak. 12 o'clock M., no appetite and
      feverish. 4 P. M., weighed 199 pounds; went home; drank one pint
      of water during the evening.

      "_Wednesday_, Jan. 24.--Slept well for nine hours. Got up at 6
      A. M., drank one glass of water and took train to the city. 8.30
      A. M., weighed 198-1/2 pounds; only half pound lost, which
      shows how greedily the tissues absorb moisture and add to
      weight. 12 o'clock M., have no appetite nor thirst, and no
      fever. Retired at 9 o'clock, feeling comfortable but a little
      feverish.

      "_Thursday_, Jan. 25.--After having slept seven and one-half
      hours took a sponge bath and brisk rubdown. Came to the city,
      and at 8.25 A. M. weighed 195 pounds. Feeling good, with no
      fever nor appetite. 4.45 P. M., weighed 193 pounds. At home
      during the evening drank two and one-half glasses of water.

      "_Friday_, Jan. 26.--Slept eight hours. No appetite and feeling
      stronger. Examined by Professor Doremus and Dr. Carpenter.
      Retired at 9 o'clock, feeling first class.

      "_Saturday_, Jan. 27.--Came to the city on the 7.45 A. M. train.
      Weighed 191 pounds. Feeling good. No fever and no appetite.

      "_Sunday_, Jan. 28.--Drank one glass of water when I got up.
      During the day and evening drank three more glasses of water.
      Retired feeling first class.

      "_Monday_, Jan. 29.--Slept eight hours last night, and came to
      the city on the 7.45 A. M. train. At 8.25 weighed 189 pounds. 4
      P. M., was examined by Dr. F. B. Carpenter, who found the
      temperature 98-1/2 deg. F., pulse regular, tongue clean.
      Measurements were: waist, 41 inches; chest, 41 inches; hip, 45
      inches; calf, 16 inches; biceps, 13-1/2 inches; forearm, 11-1/2
      inches. 5.15 P. M., weighed 188 pounds.

      "_Tuesday_, Jan. 30.--Slept eight hours; weighed 188 pounds,
      same as the night before; feeling good. 5.30 P. M., weighed
      185-1/2 pounds.

      "_Wednesday_, Jan. 31.--Slept 7-1/2 hours, drank one and
      one-half glasses of water; weighed at 8.25 A. M. 187 pounds; Dr.
      Carpenter found temperature 98 deg. F., and pulse 88; Professor
      Doremus called a little later; weighed 184-1/2 pounds.

      "_Thursday_, Feb. 1.--Rested quietly when not asleep; drank only
      one and three-quarters glasses of water all day; weighed 184
      pounds; retired feeling good.

      "_Friday_, Feb. 2.--Not feeling any hunger; was examined by F.
      B. Carpenter; temperature, 98 deg. F.; pulse, 84; weighed 183
      pounds; retired feeling well, but tired.

      "_Saturday_, Feb. 3.--Somewhat wakeful during the night. 5.45 P. M.,
      weighed 182 pounds.

      "_Sunday_, Feb. 4.--Read all day and felt well.

      "_Monday_, Feb. 5.--2 P. M., temperature, 98.4 deg. F.; pulse, 82;
      tongue clean. Measurements were: waist, 41 inches; chest, 41
      inches; hip, 43 inches; calf, 14-1/2 inches; biceps, 13-1/2
      inches; forearm, 11-1/2 inches; went to bed feeling a trifle
      feverish.

      "_Tuesday_, Feb. 6.--Wakeful during the night. 11 A. M., had my
      eyes examined by Dr. L. H. Matthez, oculist, and found a marked
      improvement in my sight over same tests of two months previous,
      being 7 degrees stronger; felt a little weak, but no fever or
      appetite; weighed 180 pounds; feeling somewhat exhausted from
      the day's labor and in entertaining guests.

      "_Wednesday_, Feb. 7.--Slept about seven hours during the night;
      when I awoke felt rested; temperature, 98.2 deg. F.; pulse, 80; have
      felt well all day; went to bed at 9.30; some fever.

      "_Thursday_, Feb. 8.--Woke up two or three times during the
      night. Drank water during the night and first thing this morning
      when I got up. Came to the city, and at 9 o'clock weighed 182
      pounds, showing a gain of two pounds over last night. Not
      feeling so well owing to the amount of water I drank last night,
      which was induced by feverishness.

      "_Friday_, Feb. 9.--Feeling first rate. At 8.25 A. M. weighed
      180 pounds. Heart action normal. No enlargement of the spleen or
      liver.

      "_Saturday_, Feb. 10.--Lost nothing in weight during the day and
      have felt well all the while.

      "_Sunday_, Feb. 11.--Passed the day in reading and drank
      frequently of water.

      "_Monday_, Feb. 12.--This being a holiday, did not go to the
      city. Passed the day in entertaining callers. Have not felt
      quite so well owing to a slight cold settling in my left kidney.

      "_Tuesday_, Feb. 13.--Measurements: waist, 38-1/2 inches; chest,
      40 inches; hip, 43 inches; calf, 14-1/2 inches; biceps, 12-1/2
      inches; forearm, 11 inches; weight, 177-1/2 pounds.

      "_Wednesday_, Feb. 14.--I attribute the cause of loss of sleep
      to a hard day's work and in reading too long last evening.

      "_Thursday_, Feb. 15.--Somewhat wakeful during the night.
      Retired at 7.30 o'clock, after a hard day's work.

      "_Friday_, Feb. 16.--3.30 P. M., temperature, 98.5 deg. F.; pulse,
      74; tongue clean; weighed 172-1/2 pounds. During the evening
      drank one cup of hot water.

      "_Saturday_, Feb. 17.--After a restful night felt well all day.

      "_Sunday_, Feb. 18.--Retired at 9 o'clock and have rested a good
      deal during the day.

      "_Monday_, Feb. 19.--Weighed 169-1/2 pounds, and retired feeling
      well.

      "_Tuesday_, Feb. 20.--Weighed 168-1/2 pounds; was examined by
      Dr. Helmer, who found me in excellent condition; 4.30 P. M.,
      weighed 169-1/2 pounds, a gain of one pound during the day, on
      account of drinking a little more water than usual.

      "_Wednesday_, Feb. 21.--Temperature, 98.5 deg. F.; pulse, 69; 4 P. M.,
      weighed 168-1/2 pounds; have not felt quite so well during
      the day.

      "_Thursday_, Feb. 22.--Occupied the day--holiday--in reading and
      reclining, and went to bed feeling pretty well.

      "_Friday_, Feb. 23.--At 8.30 A. M. weighed 166 pounds; 3.30 P. M.,
      temperature, 99 deg. F.; pulse, 98; lung expansion, 2-3/4
      inches; went home and to bed, feeling considerably exhausted
      owing to a hard day's work and too many callers.

      "_Saturday_, Feb. 24.--Did not rest very well from overtaxing
      the brain yesterday. Do not feel quite so well this morning
      owing to that fact and from drinking too much water during the
      past twenty-four hours. At 8.25 A. M. weighed 166 pounds; went
      home not feeling well to-day on account of some stomach
      disturbance, which probably comes from drinking too much water;
      did not drink any water during the evening; feeling quite tired
      at bedtime.

      "_Sunday_, Feb. 25.--Slept nine hours and rested well, and did
      not drink any water during the night. Kept quiet all day, lying
      down most of the time, and felt the coming of hunger about 6
      o'clock.

      12 o'clock noon, pulse regular; tongue clean; temperature,
      98.2 deg.F.; weighed 164 pounds. Measurements were: waist, 36-1/2
      inches; chest, 38 inches; hip, 40-1/2 inches; calf, 14 inches;
      biceps, 11 inches; forearm, 10 inches.

      Was in bed at 8 o'clock, still feeling hungry, and after a short
      sleep woke up at 11 o'clock with a sharp appetite, and ate a
      dozen raw oysters, two oranges, two-thirds cup of beef-tea, five
      crackers, and part of a cup of Oolong tea.

    I insert a photograph of Mr. Rathbun taken shortly after his
    second fast. There had been five years' trial of the No-Breakfast
    Plan before these fasting demonstrations."

One of the hardest things on earth as a mental operation is to be fair
to the opposition. Now lest I have beguiled my readers overmuch by the
force of my convictions even to the point of danger, I will give an
estimate of the danger of fasting by one of the most eminent physicians
of New York City, Dr. George F. Shrady. I quote from an interview
reported in the New York _Sun_:

    "The strange case of Milton Rathbun, of Mt. Vernon, who, to
    reduce his flesh and generally tone up his system, is said to
    have gone without food of any sort for thirty-six days, still
    continues to be the subject of more or less discussion among the
    medical men of the city. Dr. George F. Shrady, in speaking last
    evening of Mr. Rathbun's remarkable exploit, said:

[Illustration: MR. MILTON RATHBUN,

SHORTLY AFTER HIS FAST.]

    "'There are three things to say about it. In the first place,
    the fact, if it be a fact, as it seems to be, is astonishing;
    secondly, it was very foolish; and thirdly, it would be a very
    unfortunate and dangerous thing to popularize such experiments.
    Now as to whether the gentleman in question actually did go
    thirty-six days without taking nourishment of any sort is a
    matter I will not discuss. If he were a professional faster, I
    would hardly hesitate to say his claim was fraudulent, for I am
    fully convinced that all the professional fasters are frauds.
    They are simply adept sleight-of-hand men. They work out some
    adroit trick by which they may get nourishment into their
    systems in spite of the always more or less negligent or
    suspicious watchers, and then advertise for a forty days' or
    sixty days' 'fast.'

       *       *       *       *       *

    "'Now, mind you, I do not say this Mt. Vernon case is anything
    of this sort. I only say that if it is true it is most
    astounding. It is in flat contradiction of all the authorities
    on the subject of a human being's ability to do without food.
    The extreme limit of all well-authenticated cases of total
    abstinence from nourishment is from nine to ten days. Imprisoned
    miners have been known to go that time and survive.

       *       *       *       *       *

    "'But at all events it was a very foolish thing for Mr. Rathbun
    to do. About that there can be no manner of doubt. What will be
    the future effect upon him--upon his heart action, upon his
    impoverished blood, upon his nervous system, upon his organs of
    nutrition, necessarily paralyzed for days? These are grave
    questions, the answers to which may be unpleasant to Mr. Rathbun
    as they reveal themselves to him in the future. You cannot fly
    in the face of Nature and ignore all her laws in that way with
    impunity. She exacts her penalties and there is no court of
    appeals in her realm.

    "'When I say that the extreme limits of abstinence from
    nourishment in clearly authenticated cases is from nine to ten
    days, you must not get the impression that all persons can last
    that long.

       *       *       *       *       *

    "'It is a question of environment, of mental condition--whether
    buoyed by hope or stimulated by ambition to do a great feat--and
    above all, of course, of the physical condition of the faster.
    Without food the body absorbs its own tissues. Mr. Rathbun, I am
    told, was a very heavy man with a superabundance of tissue.
    Naturally he could go longer without nourishment than a weak,
    attenuated, thin-blooded man.

       *       *       *       *       *

    "'Yet Mr. Rathbun was exercising daily and about his usual
    avocations, and he abstained from food for thirty-six days!
    Well, it's remarkable!

       *       *       *       *       *

    "'But I sincerely hope Mr. Rathbun will have no imitators. It
    would be a very unfortunate thing, fraught with grave
    possibilities, if the newspaper accounts of his reduction in
    weight and general improvement in health were to move others to
    follow his example. Many persons would be injured for life,
    physically wrecked, and perhaps actually killed if they
    conscientiously did the fifth part of what he is said to have
    done.

       *       *       *       *       *

    "'And right here it may be said that there is a great deal of
    exaggeration in the sweeping statements made about people eating
    too much. If a man sleeps well, goes about his business in a
    cheerful frame of mind, and does not get what is called
    "out-of-sorts," he may be pretty sure he is not eating too much,
    even though he eat a good deal. My observation is that the
    average man who works and gets a proper amount of exercise does
    not eat too much. If you want to get work done by the engine,
    you have got to stoke up the furnace. If a man wants to keep his
    vital energies up to par he has got to put in the fuel--that is,
    the food.

    "'Of course, there are those who lead sedentary lives who get
    too much absorbed in the pleasures of the table and overfeed.
    There are a sufficient number of these, to be sure, but I think
    they are the exception. But it will be a sad mistake if even
    they seek a road to health by Mr. Rathbun's starvation
    methods.'"

The doctor is astonished, and so am I that he is astonished. This would
seem to imply that he has never had cases of acute sickness in which the
amount of food taken during many days or even weeks was too small to
play any part as a life-prolonging factor.

"It was a foolish, even dangerous experiment." How foolish or dangerous?
What vital organs suffered? Was there evidence of a loss of anything but
fat? What organs were "necessarily paralyzed" during the fast? Evidently
not the brain, else longer days of labor would not have been possible;
and the grave future possibilities in heart action, impoverished blood,
nervous system, upon organs of nutrition "necessarily paralyzed" for
days; and the extreme limit of nine or ten days before death from
starvation; and that without food the _body_ lives on its own tissues!

One can easily see that the earnest doctor is full of strong impressions
that have little of the flavor of science: truth that is not
self-evident should have the instant logic in easy reach. I may here say
that my hygienic scheme has from the first been subject to similar
attacks by physicians from the standpoint of impressions, but no
physician has ventured into print against it after becoming aware of its
physiologic basis.

I am happy to assure all readers that in all the involuntary fasts of my
cases of acute sickness or in the voluntary fasts in chronic disease,
has there been any other than improved general health as the result.
Notably was this the case in a man who fasted ten years ago for forty
days for an ulcer of the stomach, and who had been troubled with
indigestion for more than forty years. He had become nearly a mental and
physical wreck when he took to his bed with an abolished appetite. There
have since been some ten years of nearly perfect health, and now in his
seventy-seventh year he is the youngest-looking man for his age I have
ever seen. He walks the streets with the gait of a youth of twenty. To
do without food without hunger does not tax any vital power, as Dr.
Shrady may yet become aware.




XII.


The next fast to have a brief notoriety as the "most remarkable on
record" occurred in Philadelphia, the medical center of America, and
beneath the very shadow of its great medical schools; in Philadelphia, a
city that surpasses all other cities for the wisest conservatism, for
all-around level-headedness. Its journals are rarely equalled for their
clean, winnowed columns; there is no "yellow" journalism in that great,
fair city, known as the "Quaker City."

Miss Estella Kuenzel, a lady of twenty-two years, of acutest, finest
sensibilities, born to live in June and not in March, lost her mental
health to a degree that death became the final object of desire.

She had a friend in a bright young man of the name of Henry Ritter,
chemist and photographer at the Drexel Institute, a born scientist, and
who possesses the very genius of the pains and persistence of science.
Well versed in the science of the morning fast, he believed that a fast
which would merely end with hunger would result in all-around
improvement. A fast was instituted which he thought would not last more
than a few days, but went on until the days merged into weeks: it went
on because only general improvement attended it.

I first heard of it in a letter written by him on the thirty-eighth day
of the fast, during which there had been a walk of seven miles. On the
forty-second day of the fast I had a brief letter from Miss K., in which
every line was radiant with cheer.

At the Asylum five feedings per day were ordered, and at first were
rejected; but finally she accepted them as a means to end her unhappy
life; took them in bed, and in the last weeks seemed to be fleshing up,
as there was a gain of seventeen pounds above the normal, of water--she
had become dropsical. The last professional expert in her case advised a
half-gallon of milk daily in addition to the three regular meals--making
a five-meal plan.

To carry out an unopposed fast it was necessary to take her to a home
where the parents would be ignorant of this radical means to a cure.

The following is from Mr. Ritter's letters:

    "I had made my views known to the parents and daughter when the
    case commenced, and after the failure of these methods they
    decided to let me have charge of the case, which was on Sept.
    30, 1899. I at once requested them to send her to the house of
    some friends to whom I made my views known. We then discharged
    the nurse who had gone with her. With doctor and nurse gone
    there was free room for Nature's victory (the young lady being
    as deeply interested as any). We put her upon the rest, which
    was the only needed sign since her first signs of breakdown
    appeared Oct. 2, at the supper table, being the last meal she
    has taken up to to-day, Nov. 9, this being, as you will see, the
    thirty-eighth day of her fast, with cheerfulness and strength
    holding full sway. I put her to bed on the first day, to which
    she kept, with an occasional day in the rocker, until the
    eleventh day, when she took a walk of about one mile. Then she
    rested indoors until the twentieth day, when we went to church,
    walking a little over two miles, with no fatigue or tired
    feelings. I forgot to mention that we had been out driving in
    the bracing air for over three hours in the afternoon. On the
    twenty-first and twenty-second days, indoors, walking and
    working around the house, reading, etc. On the twenty-third day
    walked through the country for three miles, stopping at friends
    to enlighten them upon 'Nature's Laws;' twenty-fourth day, eight
    miles, no fatigue; twenty-fifth day, between seven and eight
    miles, no fatigue; twenty-sixth day, walked one and a half
    hours; twenty-ninth day, rainy, no walks; thirtieth day, walked
    in the evening for two and a half hours; thirty-first day,
    walked seven miles, no fatigue; thirty-second day, rainy, no
    walks; thirty-third day, went to the Exposition, walked all day
    from 2 P. M. until 11.30 P. M. (with rest while at the
    performance we attended of not over one and a quarter hours),
    this being the only resting, possibly two hours, during the
    whole time.

    "Weight taken at the start, one hundred and forty pounds; at the
    Exposition one hundred and twenty-five and three-quarters
    pounds; no sense of tired feeling, but hunger started to assert
    itself for a period of about three hours, after which it passed
    over.

    "On the thirty-fourth day went driving; thirty-fifth day, walked
    one mile, then went to the asylum to show the results. The
    physicians in charge were simply astounded, and would hardly
    believe it possible for one to be so active while taking no
    food. I believe we have done quite a little good there, as they
    have expressed the desire to try the same on others. They
    examined the tongue and took the pulse, finding both in good,
    normal state; in the evening walked another mile, visiting the
    other doctors whom her parents called in. On the thirty-sixth
    day walked one and a half miles; thirty-seventh day, walked
    seven miles, hunger sensation becoming decided.

    "I have given you a sketch of this case because it seems to me
    an unusual one owing to the great activity."


                                                 "November 18, 1899.

    "Miss Kuenzel's hunger arrived as per Nature's demand on the
    forty-fifth day at noon. One poached egg and two slices of
    toast (whole wheat). There was an intense relish for her simple
    fare, but not the least sign or desire for haste in eating. She
    was amply satisfied for the day, and relished the same bill of
    fare and quantity for the forty-sixth day, with a very slight
    luncheon in the evening. We had been to the Exposition the night
    of the forty-fourth day, when the tongue again started cleaning
    and a most distinct craving for food presented itself. It
    persisted on retiring, and also on the next morning, when she
    felt that Nature again was ready for her wonderful chemistry of
    digestion. I had her weight taken after her first meal, which
    revealed a loss of twenty pounds. We called to see the professor
    under whom she was last placed, and he was surprised with the
    clearness of her mental condition and good general appearance,
    though he observed she had gotten a trifle thinner, but which he
    had also in view to accomplish upon a five-meal plan per day. He
    tried his best to confuse and trouble her with questions, etc.,
    but found her too intensely awake, and she won the victory by
    cornering him in his own set traps. We received his
    congratulations and were made to promise to call again. I have
    now been with her to seven physicians who were interested, and
    have shown them Nature's own unhampered work.

    "Miss Kuenzel has now an intense desire to help others. You are
    at liberty to make use of Nature's work in her case for the
    benefit of others, and I shall be only too glad to give you any
    desired information that may be of use. The good work you have
    started will, I am sure, never end; and it will prove a pleasure
    to me indeed to work with added interest for the benefit of
    those in need of the same in the future."

The forty-fourth day of the fast was the busiest of all with her. She
arose at 8.30 A. M. to attend to her affairs until the late afternoon,
when she and her friend met a sister, by appointment from her home, at
the Exposition. Several hours were spent there, and when they took the
street car for return the only vacant seat was accepted by the sister,
because she was tired, and not knowing that there were forty-four days
without food with her sister, who was not tired. A striking feature of
these daily walks was that they did not cause marked fatigue. Miss
Kuenzel retired near midnight without unusual fatigue, and so ended the
forty-fourth day of the fast.

I quote from the _Chester County Times_ of Feb. 12, 1899:

    "'Conclusive evidence is being multiplied as to the wonderful
    power of fasting in the restoration of health, but it is only
    more recently that its power in the case of insanity is even yet
    more wonderful. A recent case is as near home as the city of
    Philadelphia, and those interested are very willing that others
    may know of it, so that its usefulness may be extended and its
    value appreciated. The discovery was made by Dr. E. H. Dewey, of
    Meadville, Pa., and tidings of the good work are being spread by
    Charles C. Haskell & Son, of Norwich, Conn. The editor of this
    paper knows somewhat the value of the discovery by an experience
    of several years. We give a letter from the lady who was cured.


                                 "'PHILADELPHIA, PA., Dec. 12, 1899.

    "'_My Dear Mr. Haskell:_

    "'I have received your letter of the 9th inst., and at last find
    time to fulfil the request for a statement. In regard to my
    _wonderful cure_ through "The New Gospel of Health," I would
    state that the second week after Christmas, 1898, I first had a
    paralyzing effect which affected the right side of face, body,
    and limbs, also tongue, which nearly prevented my speaking. This
    passed over and I again began working at my position as milliner
    in a large establishment, and after a short while became so
    dizzy and confused that I was compelled to ask my friends to
    direct me home. (This was around Easter, 1899.) I was then taken
    to a doctor, who at once requested me to stop working, and to
    take a _complete rest_, but not for the stomach, as he
    prescribed a severe and exacting master to stimulate the _tired
    and overworked stomach_ to _renewed life_, and so give the
    nerves plenty of pure food, as they were in need of same. I
    then, after getting a ravenous hunger, weakened myself still
    more and became worse. My stomach felt numb and paralyzed, as
    did also my other internal organs, but this was put down against
    me as an illusion. So a _professor of nervous diseases_ was
    called in consultation, owing to my many desires to die (as life
    had no sunshine, flowers, or music for me); I was simply living
    a living death of torture which these professors would have were
    illusions. My parents were then informed that I must be sent to
    an asylum, where I was for ten long weeks. _They_ also told me
    that my feelings were illusions, and proceeded to banish the
    same by giving the _tired-out nerves a little rest_ and _plenty
    of nourishment_ on a _five-meal_ plan per day. If refused (owing
    to a loss of appetite), I was threatened to have nature helped
    by the aid of a stomach or nasal tube. I lost none of my
    illusions while there, as I could not feel any improvement in my
    feelings. I left the institution June 28, 1899, feeling no
    better; in fact, worse than when I arrived there. I was then
    taken from one doctor to another, the one wishing to operate,
    the other not; one advising me to go to the seashore, country,
    etc., but _none_ to give my stomach the needed vacation.

    "'It was then that my friend, Mr. Ritter, stepped in, as he saw
    the failures of professors and specialists, and begged my
    parents to let him have a chance to demonstrate what Dr. Dewey's
    method would do for melancholy illusions and tired-out stomachs
    and nerves. I then went to friends, and, in entire ignorance of
    my parents, began under directions of Mr. Ritter the most
    natural, sensible, and cheapest of all cures. I began my fast on
    Oct. 3, and broke the same on Nov. 16. During the first week of
    my fast I was in bed; during the second (excepting the eleventh
    day, when I took my first walk of seven-eighths of a mile) I was
    in bed, in rocker, reading, etc. On the twentieth day, after a
    drive of three hours, went to church, walking two and
    one-sixteenth miles. I then stayed indoors again on the
    twenty-first and twenty-second days, and then started taking
    daily walks (weather permitting). I went out walking
    twenty-three out of the forty-five days of my fast, and during
    that time walked one hundred and twelve miles. This was besides
    the carriage-drives, Exposition, and evening gatherings (walking
    to same included). I did not in the least feel tired or weak,
    but happier and brighter each day of the fast, as I could feel
    the effects of a new life throughout my whole body. My mind also
    became clearer and dizziness became a thing of the past. This
    was indeed _joy supreme to me_, and life became once more a joy
    instead of a burden. Sunshine, trees, flowers, etc., again made
    an impression, and my parents, sisters, and friends are rejoiced
    to see me in my happy normal state of health.

    "'I have gone through a year of unspeakable torture brought on
    by overwork and _human-wise professors_; but at last, through
    the wonderful teachings Dr. Dewey has given to mankind, and
    through a friend, who was able to preach the "New Gospel of
    Health," am now well, strong, and happy. May God only help and
    bless the many sufferers throughout the world (especially in the
    asylums) with the rays of this Gospel. I have been saved, no
    doubt, from a gloomy future, and may such be the realization of
    many more unfortunate souls is the sincere wish through
    experience of

        "'Yours very sincerely,

            "'ESTELLA F. KUENZEL.'"

This case was summed up in the Philadelphia _Public Ledger_ of Dec. 25,
1899, whose columns are guarded with unsurpassed care, as follows:

    "One of those cases which a judicious editor ponders in no
    little perplexity is that of a young lady who was taken out of
    an insane hospital and subjected to a protracted fast, without
    medical supervision, and with results that appear to have been
    quite successful. On the one hand, there is the benefit that may
    be derived by having the attention of the profession called to
    the subject, with possibly good results; on the other hand,
    there is the danger of having a lot of ignorant or impulsive
    people risking their lives by starving themselves for this or
    that real or fancied disease, forgetting the adage that a little
    knowledge is a dangerous thing, especially in therapeutics.

    "The mind of the young lady referred to became affected about a
    year ago, and after what was regarded by her parents as an
    unprofitable period of treatment for two and a half months in a
    hospital for the insane she has been apparently cured by
    fasting--some would call it starvation. The case has been
    attracting attention and discussion lately in a growing circle
    that has included a few physicians.

    "The subject is a Miss K., aged twenty-two years. Henry Ritter,
    who has charge of the Photography Department of the Drexel
    Institute, and who is better acquainted with the matter than any
    one else, furnished a _Ledger_ reporter with the particulars as
    they are here given, the name and address of the young lady, for
    obvious reasons, being omitted. Mr. Ritter was at first loath to
    have any publicity given the case, but felt upon reflection that
    the results were properly a subject matter for inquiry by
    physicians, at least, not to speak of others who may be
    interested.

    "Miss K., by the advice of specialists who had treated her at
    home, was put under treatment for melancholy in an institution
    for the insane. Mr. Ritter, being an intimate friend of the
    family, visited her, and, he says, found her retrograding. She
    was receiving three meals a day, with two luncheons between
    them. Having built up his own digestive powers by following the
    tenets laid down by Dr. Dewey, a Crawford county physician, he
    had become a student and advocate of the latter's theory,
    briefly stated, that no food should be given to a patient except
    in response to a natural call or appetite for it. Believing that
    no improvement could result from the course Miss K. was
    receiving in the hospital, he prevailed upon her parents to
    permit him to have her placed in the home of a friend, and
    suggested the fasting process. This was the more readily done as
    the physicians in whose care she had been advised her parents to
    leave their daughter as much as possible among strangers.

    "This young lady, according to Mr. Ritter, was absolutely
    without food for forty-five days, beginning October 3 and ending
    November 16. He says he did not fear, as others did, that she
    would starve, as the authority he depended on had never fed a
    sick patient during a practice covering twenty-two years, no
    matter how protracted the case might have been, and claimed to
    have had only the best results. 'This,' said Mr. Ritter, 'is on
    the theory that, since all bodily energy is the result of the
    brain, by abstaining from feeding in the absence of appetite
    there is all the energy of cure undiverted by needless waste in
    the stomach. Feeding the sick, this physician contends, is a tax
    on their vital power, adding indigestion to whatever other
    troubles exist: because the brain has the power in sickness to
    absorb nourishment from the body, as predigested food, so that
    it never loses weight, even in death from starvation.'

    "The patient herself became interested, Mr. Ritter says, and
    evidenced great relief from abstinence from enforced periodic
    feeding. Gradually a numb feeling of which she had complained as
    affecting her internal organs, and which had been ascribed to
    her illusions, left her, and she appeared to gain daily in
    strength and brightness. Mr. Ritter's narrative proceeds:

    "'On the eleventh day of her fast a walk was suggested, and she
    covered about seven-eighths of a mile; on the twentieth day she
    was taken for a carriage drive of three hours in the afternoon,
    and in the evening she walked to church and back, a distance of
    something more than two miles. From the twenty-third day she
    took walks daily, excepting on October 31 and November 3, when
    rain prevented. She visited friends and the theatre and the
    Exposition, went to church several times, to the hospital where
    she had been a patient--this on the thirty-fifth day of her
    fast--and to the Drexel Institute on the thirty-ninth and
    forty-second days. A table of dates shows that she walked from
    two or three to six and eight and as high as nine miles a day
    during the period of forty-five days that she abstained from
    food, with a general increase of strength and cheer and no sign
    of fatigue. Hunger sensations were marked on the forty-fourth
    day and night, and on the morning of the forty-fifth day Miss K.
    broke the fast by eating a poached egg and two slices of
    buttered whole wheat toasted bread.

    "'During her fast she was seen by seven physicians and medical
    professors, President MacAlister and professors of the Drexel
    Institute, and many others.'

    "The young lady's weight at the beginning of the fast, Mr.
    Ritter says, was one hundred and forty pounds, and just after
    the meal with which she broke the fast she weighed one hundred
    and twenty pounds. By December 15 she had regained nine pounds,
    meanwhile eating one meal daily and sometimes two, with an
    occasional light luncheon.

    "Dr. Chase, medical director of the institution above referred
    to, was visited on Saturday by a _Ledger_ reporter in regard to
    the case of Miss K. He had been informed of her long fast and
    of its results, and had seen Miss K. herself when she called at
    the asylum on the thirty-fifth day of the fast. He said that
    when she was first brought to the asylum she was suffering from
    melancholia, and was put under the treatment which all the
    leading alienists had found most beneficial for persons
    suffering from nervous disorders, viz., quiet, rest of mind and
    body, and full, nourishing diet, carefully selected to produce
    the best results. During the time she remained at the asylum she
    improved both in bodily and mental health.

    "Referring to the treatment she had received under Mr. Ritter's
    supervision since leaving the asylum, Dr. Chase said he had
    first heard of the system through a work published two years ago
    by Dr. George S. Keith, of London, from which he first learned
    of Dr. Dewey, who also uses the fasting cure. In all the cases
    cited by Dr. Keith none had been afflicted with any mental
    disorder. He looked upon the cases, however, as showing some
    remarkable results, warranting a careful study. But it would not
    do to adopt such a system without a most thorough examination.
    As 'one swallow does not make a summer,' neither will one case
    nor half a dozen cases cured by such a method prove anything. No
    universal method can be adopted for treating disease. Hardly two
    cases are alike. Cures also may be brought about in different
    ways if the exact condition of the patient is understood.

    "'Mr. Ritter says the patient lent herself very willingly to the
    treatment, which was a great deal to start out with in her case.
    But I am surprised that a young man with no medical knowledge
    would do a thing like that. The treatment might easily have
    resulted differently. If he had been a doctor, he would have had
    that fact to sustain him in case he got into trouble. The case
    might very well have resulted fatally, because the treatment was
    so contrary to what would naturally be pursued by physicians in
    nervous cases.

    "'I do not ridicule the system. There have been cases which were
    cured by ways not recognized by the general practitioner after
    they had been given up. I am a firm believer that in selected
    cases the fasting method would be efficacious, but I do not
    believe in its general application.

    "'Mr. Ritter is evidently an enthusiast, and apt to overstate
    the points in favor of the method, neglecting those which tell
    against it. It is too early yet to say what the outcome of Miss
    K.'s case will be. I think the matter ought to be looked into
    more fully. Mr. Ritter could not have been with the patient at
    all times. It is a remarkable thing that she should have kept up
    and had the strength reported, unless she had some food. He may
    have been deceived in that.'"

During several months since the fast there have been the best physical
_health_ and mental condition, the weight having increased several
pounds above the former average.

Mr. Ritter conducted this case in a blaze of publicity. He showed it to
no less than seven physicians, some of whom were college professors, and
one of them at near the close of the fast suggested that if food were
not soon taken a sudden collapse would be the result. There seemed to
have been less danger of this calamity on the forty-fourth day than on
any other.

The reliability of the fast was so clearly evident that the leading
papers of the city accepted it as authentic news and of the most
startling kind. _The Times_ gave several columns of its first page to an
illustrated article.[1]

    The accompanying illustration shows Miss Kuenzel on the
    forty-first day of her fast. She walked seven miles on this day
    without any signs of fatigue.

[Illustration: Copyrighted 1900, by Henry Ritter.

MISS ESTELLA F. KUENZEL,

FORTY-FIRST DAY OF FAST.]

The following table of miles walked were measured from exact diary notes
with bicycle and cyclometer after the fast was broken. The table gives
the total sum of each day, walks being taken both afternoon and evenings
of same day.

       Date.          Miles.

    October  3
       "     4
       "     5
       "     6
       "     7
       "     8
       "     9
       "    10
       "    11
       "    12
       "    13          7/8
       "    14
       "    15
       "    16
       "    17
       "    18
       "    19
       "    20
       "    21
       "    22        2-1/16
       "    23
       "    24
       "    25        3
       "    26        6-5/8
       "    27        5-7/8
       "    28        4-1/2
       "    29        4-1/8
       "    30        5-5/8
       "    31, rain
    November 1        6-3/4
       "     2        8
       "     3 rain
       "     4        9
       "     5        6
       "     6        3-3/4
       "     7        1-1/2
       "     8        7-1/4
       "     9        7
       "    10        4-1/4
       "    11        2-5/8
       "    12        7
       "    13        2-1/4
       "    14        3-1/4
       "    15        5
       "    16        5-3/4
                    --------
                    112-1/16

The next fast, under the care of Mr. Ritter, still holds the record as
being the most remarkable for its number of days and the miracle of
results. The following account of it appeared in the _North American_,
one of whose editors had personal knowledge of its history:

    "Leonard Thress, of 2618 Frankford Avenue, has learned how to
    live without eating. By physical experience he has proved not
    only that food is not a daily necessity of the human system, but
    that abstinence therefrom for protracted periods is beneficial.
    Indeed, it saved his life. He has just finished a fifty days'
    fast. When he began it he was on the brink of the grave and his
    physicians had abandoned hope. When he ended it he was in better
    health than he had enjoyed for years, although in the meantime
    he had lost seventy-six pounds, falling away from two hundred
    and nine to one hundred and thirty-three pounds.

    "Thress, who is about fifty-seven years old, was attending the
    Grand Army Encampment at Buffalo in the fall of 1898, when he
    caught a violent cold, which settled in his bronchial tubes. It
    proved so stubborn that his general health became affected, and
    a year later dropsy developed. His condition grew steadily
    worse, and at Christmas time, 1899, it was such that he could
    neither walk nor lie prostrate, but was compelled to sit
    constantly in an armchair. His doctors exhausted their skill in
    the effort to bring relief, and eventually, in the early part of
    last January, they told him that their medicines refused to act,
    and that his death was a question of only a few days.

    "Up to this time Thress had been subsisting on the meagre diet
    permitted to a man in his condition, but his stomach rebelled
    even at that. He had heard of the Dewey fasting cure and its
    boasted efficacy against all human ills, and, though he had
    little faith, death was already looming before him, and he knew
    that he could lose nothing by the experiment.

    "He began to fast on January 11 by taking in the morning a
    portion of Henzel's preparation of salts in a glass of water and
    the juice of two oranges, and in the evening a hot lemonade. For
    twenty-five days he also drank a teaspoonful of a tonic
    consisting chiefly of iron, but the rest of the diet he
    continued until two weeks ago, when he discontinued the salts
    and orange juice and confined himself to a hot lemonade at
    morning and evening. This was his only sustenance until last
    Thursday.

    "According to Thress's own recital, the effects of this course
    of treatment were amazing. He says that the natural craving for
    food was gone after the first day. Three days later he had
    regained so much strength that he was able to go upstairs to
    bed and enjoyed a good night's sleep. From that time on,
    although he steadily lost in weight, his vitality grew greater,
    and on January 22 he left the house and took a half-mile walk.

    "Before three weeks of his fast had elapsed his dropsy had
    disappeared, and thereafter he took almost daily walks,
    increasing the distance with his strength. Some days he covered
    as many as five miles, and never less than two, even while he
    was growing thinner and thinner, as the accompanying table
    shows.

    "For the first time since the beginning of his fast he became
    hungry last Thursday, March 1, and he felt that he should like
    some pigs' feet jelly. It is one of the prescriptions of the
    fasting cure that when hunger finally comes the patient shall
    eat whatever he craves, so Thress consumed two slices of the
    jelly and one piece of gluten bread, with butter. He says he
    enjoyed it and felt well afterward.

    "He ate no more that day, but at noon yesterday he became hungry
    again, and this time his appetite was for something more
    substantial. He disposed of a dish of mashed potatoes, some red
    cabbage, another portion of pigs' feet jelly, apple sauce, and a
    cream puff for dessert. He even smoked a cigar after the meal,
    enjoyed it, and felt still better. He says he will eat no
    regular meals, but only when he becomes hungry.

    "While he looks haggard and worn from the loss of flesh, Thress
    declares that all his ailments have left him and that he never
    felt healthier and heartier in his life."

       *       *       *       *       *

    "The following table shows how Thress grew stronger and walked
    miles while he was constantly losing weight from a fifty-days'
    fast:

                     Weight.
    January 11         209
       "    12         207
       "    13         205
       "    14         202
       "    15         201
       "    16         200
       "    17         199
       "    18         196
       "    19         192
       "    20         190
       "    21         188
       "    22         186 Walked 1/2 mile.
       "    23         180   "    2 miles.
       "    24         177   "    2   "
       "    25         172   "    3   "
       "    26         167   "    3   "
       "    27         165   "    3   "
       "    28         162   "    2-1/2  "
       "    29         160   "    3   "
       "    30         157
       "    31         155   "    3   "
    February 1         154
       "     2         153
       "     3         152   "    3   "
       "     4         151
       "     5         149   "    3   "
       "     6         147   "    3   "
       "     7         146   "    3   "
       "     8         145
       "     9         145   "    4   "
       "    10         145   "    4   "
       "    11         145
       "    12         145   "    4   "
       "    13         145
       "    14         145   "    3   "
       "    15         144   "    2   "
       "    16         142
       "    17         140
       "    18         140
       "    19         140
       "    20         138   "    2    "
       "    21         137   "    4    "
       "    22         135 Walked 3 miles.
       "    23         135   "    3   "
       "    24         135
       "    25         135
       "    26         135
       "    27         133   "    2   "
       "    28         133
    March    1         133

A. H. Potts, Editor of the _Chester County Times_, a man who has the
largest faith in eating only to restore the wastes of the body, thus
gives vent to his emotions after seeing the case by invitation of Mr.
Ritter:

    "On January 10 there sat in his home, at 2618 Frankford Avenue,
    Philadelphia, Mr. Leonard Thress, with dropsy, hopelessly given
    up to a speedy death by the many physicians he had vainly sought
    and paid well for relief. His weight was two hundred and nine
    pounds. His limbs were at the bursting point, and the water was
    close up to the top of his chest. He could not lie down nor even
    lay his head back without choking, and to walk across the room
    completely exhausted him. At that critical moment a friend of
    his heard of Miss Kuenzel's miraculous cure, and told him of it.
    He at once sent for Mr. Ritter, who thought that a cure was in
    his reach, and on January 11 Thress commenced a fast that has
    been absolute up to yesterday, the only things passing his lips
    being water, a little lemonade, and rarely the juice of an
    orange. Learning through the _Chester County Times_ that we were
    interested in Dr. Dewey's discovery, he invited us to come and
    see the cases now under his care, and on Friday of last week we
    gladly availed ourselves of the opportunity to see the living
    proof of what we believed but had never seen. We were very
    cordially received at Mr. Ritter's home, and instead of meeting
    a pompous, egotistic, big man, as we might expect, we met a
    young gentleman of small stature, like ourselves, modest,
    retiring, and claiming no credit for his own part in these
    remarkable cures; but insisting that he is only observing the
    progress of cases, following in the line of truths discovered
    only by Dr. Dewey, giving such advice as he is enabled to do
    from his thorough knowledge of chemistry, anatomy, and hygiene.
    He took us to the house of Mr. Thress, and the startling
    impressions we received can never be effaced. We seemed to be in
    the presence of one who had arisen from the dead, and could not
    realize the truth of what we saw and heard from him and his
    estimable wife, who shows the happiness she feels in receiving
    her husband back to life. Impossible as it seems, yet on the
    previous day, as well as many other days, that man had walked
    three miles after six hours given to his business as a baker,
    which he now attends to personally. All traces of dropsy have
    disappeared, and his weight is now less than one hundred and
    thirty-five pounds, having lost this nearly seventy-five pounds
    of water through the natural channels at the rate of five or six
    pounds per day at times. His eyesight has grown younger and his
    hand is firm. He sleeps soundly several hours out of each
    twenty-four, and is almost a cured man, although the curative
    action is still going forward throughout his system, and his
    many friends are now awaiting the arrival of his normal healthy
    appetite, which in these cases does not arrive until the cure is
    entire, and then it comes in such a way as not to be mistaken.
    On Monday of this week we again visited him, taking a friend who
    has long suffered similarly to what he did, that she might see
    results for herself. We found him looking even better than on
    Friday, and it is very interesting to hear him tell his
    experience, which he will be glad to impart to those who are
    seeking after the truth, and interested in the cure of disease
    of themselves or their friends by this natural and without price
    (but priceless) means. We also visited two other of the five
    cases over which Mr. Ritter is at present keeping watch, and
    every one bore evidences of the great truth. No one should
    undertake the fast on their own responsibility, as certain
    conditions may arise requiring the eye of one who has made the
    matter a study, and no one should pass an opinion on the matter
    until they read Dr. Dewey's _New Gospel of Health_, wherein the
    reasons are made so plain that all can understand."

[Illustration: Copyrighted 1900, by Henry Ritter.

MR. LEONARD THRESS,

FIFTIETH DAY OF FAST.]

Mr. Thress has regained his normal weight and has been in the best of
health in the several months since the fast.[2]

The following case was deemed a miracle by all friends: Mrs. H. B., a
woman of seventy-six, became exceedingly breathless, due, it was
supposed, to defective heart action that had been chronic for many
years. The final result was general dropsy. The eyelids had become so
heavy that reading could be indulged only a short time because of their
weight; the throat was also charged with water so as to make swallowing
difficult. Beneath the eyes and jaws were pockets of water--in short,
the skin of the entire body was distended, a condition that had deceived
the friends as revealing only an increase of her natural stoutness. The
real condition became known through a call to treat a bad cold.

What had authorized medical art to promise in such a case? Absolutely
nothing, as she had become too old and weak to be subjected to the
ordinary means for such a general condition. As for a fast for one so
old, that was the last thing that would have been thought of: her age
and debility would only have seemed to invite more daily food than she
had been taking.

She was put on a fast, or rather the fast was continued, the cold
having abolished her appetite. It went on until the fifteenth day, with
increasing general strength and diminishing weight. The last days before
hunger came she was able to go up a long flight of stairs without the
aid of the railing and without marked loss of breath, the heart-murmur
had nearly disappeared, and water by the gallon seemed to have been
absorbed.

On the fifteenth day there was a desire for food, that was taken with
relish through the enlarged throat without difficulty; the water pockets
had become emptied, and the lids so thin and light as to reveal no
fatigue in reading. Thence on one meal a day became the rule; and since
there have been five years without any recurrence of the
conditions--five years of remarkable general health and girl-time relish
for her daily food.

How often has the cutting down of the daily food by the old and weak
been condemned as too severe an ordeal to be safe! For this woman there
have been these acquired years of nearly perfect health, and the end
will be in the natural, easier death of old age.

The following is inserted as additional evidence of Nature's power over
disease, and that brain-workers may go on with their labors with
increasing power while waiting for natural hunger in cases in which
hunger is possible:

    Rev. C. H. Dalrymple, of Hampden, Mass., has just completed a
    fast, of which he says, February 5, 1900: "My fast continued
    thirty-nine and one-half days. My appetite came on me about 9
    o'clock at night, and I thought I would wait until the next
    day; but two boiled eggs and some dry toast would not retire
    before my presence. I have never had such an assault upon my
    will power as that imagined egg and toast made on me. I was
    finally compelled to surrender. My tongue had been clearing up
    that day, and the next day I was hungry at noon. I have not
    missed a first-class appetite at noon since. My tongue has kept
    clear and my taste has remained sweet. I have had no chills nor
    fevers this winter, nor cold in any form. I have made no
    allowance for my sickness and have never worked harder. My flesh
    came back rapidly, and now I think I must weigh about fifteen
    pounds more than last summer. _I gained strength beyond all
    question about three weeks before my appetite returned. I would
    work all day long finally._ It was good to get well."

Mr. Ritter conducted over twenty cases, some being able to carry on
their usual avocations. I give the most important ones: Mr. A. H.,
forty-five days; Miss B. H., forty-two days; Mrs. L., thirty-eight days;
Mr. L. W., thirty-six days; Miss L. J., thirty-five days; Mrs. M.,
thirty-one days; Miss E. S., twenty-six days; Mr. G. R., twenty-five
days; Mr. P. R., twenty-four days; and Miss E. Westing, forty-two days,
who, on the fortieth day, was able to sing with unusual clearness and
power, and ended her fast without losing a day from her duties as a
teacher of music.[3]

Wonderful are these fasts? Not in the physiological sense. These fasts
went on with only increasing comfort by day and more refreshing sleep
at night. It is quite another thing to endure the fasts of acute
sickness, for such they all are. That life is maintained for days and
weeks, even months, under pain, discomfort--under all the torturing
conditions of such diseases as pneumonia, typhoid fever, or inflammatory
rheumatism, is far more a matter to wonder over.

I may well wonder that Nature is powerful enough to cure the sick at all
even under the wisest aid; but with me the abiding wonder is that
physicians do not see that acute sickness is a loss of all the natural
conditions of digestion, with the wasting bodies the clearest evidence
that food is neither digested nor assimilated. I wonder with only
increasing impatience that the stomach is not understood as a machine
that Nature wills shall not be run to tax her resources when life is in
the throes of disease.

[Illustration: Copyrighted 1900, by Henry Ritter.

MISS ELIZABETH W. A. WESTING,

FORTIETH DAY OF FAST.]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The fasts conducted by Mr. Ritter constitute performances of the
most impressive kind as demonstrative evidence of the practical
physiology I have been teaching for many years. For the copyrighted
photographs he has kindly furnished I am very thankful, and to all who
have been willing to enhance the value and interest of this volume by
such eyesight illustrations.

[2] The accompanying illustration shows Mr. Thress on the fiftieth day
of his fast; weight loss, seventy-six pounds. Does the picture reveal
any skeleton condition?

[3] The accompanying illustration is a reproduced copyrighted picture of
Miss E. Westing. This picture was taken on the return home from her
duties at church on the fortieth day during the cold of winter; the
weight at the start being one hundred and ten pounds, at the close on
the forty-second day ninety-three pounds--loss, seventeen pounds.




XIII.


I had not been long engaged in observing the evolution of cure through
Nature when I began to suspect strongly, as before intimated, that
fasting is the true "medicine for the mind diseased." Not less evident
than the cure of various ailings would be the emergence of the soul into
higher life, and in some instances from the depth of despair. As the
scope of my vision constantly enlarged through multiplying experiences,
I began to see great hopes of the cure of the gravest of all
diseases--insanity--through a rigid application of this method in
Nature. I gave the matter so much thought and study that I wrote a
monograph on the subject with the idea of publishing it, but gave it up
to the idea of telling my impressions in "The No-breakfast Plan."

There are the same structural changes in the evolution of insanity as in
that of catarrh. There is a morbid structural basis in minds diseased,
the abnormal mentality or morality being merely symptoms of a physical
disease. Of all human legacies, structural weakness of the mental or
moral sense is the most unfortunate.

I shall say no more about the forms of mental disease than that there is
distinctively both intellectual and moral insanity as a direct result
of disease of the intellectual and moral centres. This will be more
clearly seen when I recall the fact that moral insanity in its worse
form--the suicidal--often exists with such intellectual clearness that
there is the greatest ingenuity displayed in carrying out
self-destruction. These mind and soul centres are often gravely diseased
without impairment of muscle energy: the furious strength of the insane
is an abiding fear with all.

It is clear that weakness of structure so soft as brain, a substance
which is on the dividing-line between liquids and solids, must be of the
gravest form from the first: grave because so fragile, grave because the
sick centres cannot rest as the broken arm, the sick body: these
centres, regardless how sick, must continue to serve, even in abnormal
ways.

The possibility of insanity must always be a matter of the degree of the
primary structural weakness and the energy and persistence of the
operative forces; on these must depend the mere gentle, persistent
illusion, or that fury of mania which transforms man, the "image of the
Creator," into a wild beast. That insanity, no matter what its form or
degree, is an evolution from an ancestral structural legacy, not
essentially different from the structural conditions evolved from those
of any other chronic disease, I cannot have the slightest doubt, any
more than I can have for the structural means for the cure.

There is nothing that so illustrates the civilization, the benevolence
of the age and of the nations as these palaces we call hospitals for the
insane. Whatever there is that can add comfort to the body, or charm to
the tastes, or new life to the soul has its culmination in these palaces
of wood and stone, with one great exception: the structural condition of
the diseased centres indicating rest, even as the ulcer, wound, or
fracture, has no part in the methods of cure.

The feeding is all done not at the time of hunger, but at the time of
day. All patients are expected to eat no less than three meals a day,
regardless of any desire for food and whether the patient spends all his
time in bed in mindless apathy, whether pacing his room with meaningless
tread, whether active in light service in the building or in heavy labor
without. When there is refusal to eat it seems to be taken for granted
that suicide by starvation is the design, and the pumping of food into
the stomach through the nose is the common resort. There seems to be no
thought that there may be no hunger in such cases, and no apprehension
of any danger from not eating; that in this they follow the instincts of
brutes. Would the desire for food not come and with a saner condition of
mind if they were permitted their own ways of eating?

A physically strong woman, whom I knew well, was sent to a hospital for
the insane in a generally bad state of mind, with destructive
propensities marked. With no desire for food, and certainly with no mind
to realize the need to eat without hunger, she naturally refused to
eat. But for a time her meals were forced down her throat, a proceeding
that taxed the strength of several strong arms.

Why were the meals not omitted long enough to cause such a reduction of
strength as to make feeding less expensive in the outlay of others'
muscle? The persistent refusal to eat resulted in a cessation of all
efforts to enforce food; left to the gentler hands of Nature for a time,
the mental hurricane subsided in great degree on the return of hunger,
and long before there was an appreciable loss of weight or strength. In
a few months this woman was able to return to her home, and with
restored mind to tell me of the violent feedings she had endured.

Now let us look again to the structural conditions involved in diseases
of the mind. There are those soft, pulpy centres from which emanate the
highest powers of life: power to think, to admire, to rejoice, or to
suffer; and we know how digestive power varies along the scale between
ecstacy and despair. In mental disease there is the same abnormal
structural change as in other local diseases; but for these sick
mind-centres there is no rest. There must be still thinking and feeling,
no matter how chaotic, to tax them, and there is no cheer to electrify
the stomach into easy display of power. We may well marvel that powers
so wonderful as the power to think, love, admire, see, hear, and feel
are located in structures so fragile as the brain; and we may well
marvel at the provision of the turret of flinty hardness to protect it
from violence.

Now we are to consider these centres of energy as abnormally weak in all
their structures at birth in those who become insane: these are the
luckless legacies from the fathers and the mothers, and for how far back
in the ancestral line we do not know. We are to consider that there is
the same abnormal condition of the cerebral bloodvessels and of the
softer inter-vascular structures as in other local diseases; and when
you recall the fact that everything that worries, that adds discomfort
to either mind or muscles, is a force that tends to develop weakness and
disease, you will see how it applies in the evolution of insanity.

Shall these fragile centres be permitted to rest when overwork has made
them sick, or is there any other rational means for their recovery?
Shall they not be permitted to rest when abundantly able to keep
physically nourished in a way that does not cause even the slightest
shade of discomfort?

Again, let it be borne in mind that recovery from acute disease is
attended with a revival of strength in every power that makes life worth
living, and that every person not acutely sick who has fasted under my
care or who has cut down the waste of brain power by less daily food has
found the same revival of power. To this there have been no exceptions.

What do we fear in sickness? Is it disease or the wasting pounds? Since
they will disappear when Nature would have the food-gate closed, since
they reappear when there is the highest possible reach of mere relish,
and when all the other senses have become more acute, and also when
existence has become almost ecstatic, why ever oppress the weak or sick
centres when Nature wills a rest?

The literature on the disease of the mind has become so massive in mere
bulk, in its physiological refinements, that it would require time with
a long reach into eternity to go through it; but it has not come to my
knowledge that it contains any reference to the brain as a
self-nourishing, self-charging dynamo; that therefore the stomach is
only a machine whose use can well be omitted for long periods when these
centres of moral and intellectual energy have become worried into
disease, with rest the only means, the only need for all the recovery
possible.

"Oh, you giants of the medical profession!" You who have been elected to
preside over these great homes of the mentally wrecked because of your
eminence in character, ability, experience, and professional
attainments, do you deny the soundness of the physiology involved in
this method of reaching health through Nature? Then let me array against
you Alexander Haig, M. A., M. D. Oxon., F. R. C. P., Physician to the
Metropolitan Hospital, and the Royal Hospital, and for Children and
Women; late Casualty Physician to St. Bartholomew's Hospital. I quote
from his exhaustive work, _Uric Acid in the Causation of Disease_:

"And now I come to the causes which led me to take too much albumen and
to suffer severely; in _Fads of an Old Physician_, Dr. Keith refers to
another work on diet, by Dr. Dewey, of Meadville, Pa., _The True Science
of Living_, and the chief point in this book is that temporary, complete
starvation till there is once more a healthy appetite is the best cure
for a host of dyspepsia, debilities, depression, mental and bodily, and
numerous other troubles, and that for similar less severe disturbances
of nutrition the great remedy is to leave out the breakfast, so as to
give the stomach a long rest of sixteen hours or more, with the object
of allowing it to recuperate and accumulate secretions after the last
meal of the previous day.

"It seems from internal evidence in Dr. Dewey's book, a copy of which I
owe to Dr. Keith, that his plans have been completely successful in a
large number of cases, _and it seems to me that his logic is
unanswerable_, and that in his main contentions he is perfectly right.

"Having arrived at this conclusion, I proceeded forthwith to put the
matter to the test of experience by placing myself on two meals a
day--that is, I left out my breakfast--and the result was I ate such a
good lunch at 1 P. M. that it was impossible to take anything more till
dinner-time, 7.30 or 8 P. M.; so that I reduced myself at once from four
meals a day to two. The result was exactly what Dr. Dewey describes. I
felt extremely bright and well in the morning, and capable of very good
work, both mental and bodily. At 1 P. M. I had keen hunger, even for dry
bread; such hunger as I had not experienced for years. After lunch
(breakfast) I felt a little bit dull and occasionally sleepy, and the
mental work for the first hour or two after it was not as good as usual.
About 5 P. M. I was very thirsty and had to have a drink of water, but
there was not the least desire for food until several hours later;
though by 7.30 or 8 P. M. I was able to manage another fairly good meal;
and thus my meals automatically, so to speak, reduced themselves to
two."

I also quote from his work on _Diet and Food_, page 10:

"It is also possible, by introducing more food than can possibly be
digested, to overpower digestion so that nothing is digested and
absorbed, and starvation results, a fact that has been brought to the
front in the most interesting manner in the writings of Dr. Dewey."

And who is Dr. Keith? You know that he is one of the youngest physicians
in all Scotland, even if he does possess eighty years that are no burden
to him. I quote him from his _Fads of an Old Physician_:

"Dr. Dewey's grand means of cure now is abstinence for the time from all
food, and this he carries out to a degree which must astonish most
physicians of the present day, as well as their patients. During times
of sickness, when there is no desire for food, he gives none till the
desire comes, and then only if the state of the tongue and general
condition show that the power of digestion has returned. This may be in
a few days, or in severe cases, as of rheumatic fever, it may not be for
forty days or even longer. He points out very forcibly that we have all
a store of material laid up in the body which supplies what is required
for keeping necessary functions of the system going, while no food can
be usefully taken in the stomach. I had mentioned this provision in my
_Plea_, and had stated that so long as it lasts it is sufficient to
preserve life. I also suggested that it might be found that the waste of
the body was less when this internal supply was alone trusted to, than
when it was supplemented by food from without which the organs of
nutrition were not in a condition to utilize. This, to my mind, Dr.
Dewey has proved to be the fact, and no one can read his case without
being convinced that it is so. He gives a most interesting table from
Dr. Yeo, showing what textures of the body waste most rapidly in
disease. Fat is at one end of the scale, and at the other the brain,
which does not waste till all the other textures and organs are depleted
to the utmost.

"In cases of slighter disease where the patient is able to be about or
to carry on his business, but with discomfort, the same abstinence from
all food is recommended. It is usually found that work can be done more
easily, and that strength actually increases, although the starving may
have to be kept up for several days. But the great _coup_ in Dr.
Dewey's practice is, that to improve or to preserve health he advises
all to give up breakfast, and to fast till the mid-day meal. In this he
has had a very large number of followers, very much to their advantage.
It may be that the omission of breakfast is more needed and has greater
effect in America than it would have on this side of the Atlantic. In
America the meal is generally a very full one, made up in a large
measure of a variety of hot cakes, also flesh food and tea or coffee.
The other two meals of the day are full, 'square' meals likewise. I have
seen much overfeeding in this country, but never to such a degree, and
so generally, as I have seen in America and on American steamers. In one
of the latter the cooking was the worst I ever met with, but the hard
meat was swallowed all the same, and the consequences must have been
grievous."

Are you still without any questioning of your authorized, established
methods of treating the mentally sick? Then let me quote against you
another man across the ocean, whose ability, learning, and professional
attainments are of the highest order. I quote from _Air, Food, and
Exercise_, by A. Rabagliati, M. A., M. D., F. R. C. S., Edin., a man
with whom patient, exhaustive investigation is only a recreation:

"It has been shown by physiologists that certain tissues are absorbed
and used before others. Dr. Dewey, of Pennsylvania, with whose views I
am glad to find myself in general accord, and who seems to have made
the same attempt as the writer to view the facts of medical practice
from an independent--and may I say, original?--standpoint, quotes a
table of great significance from Dr. Yeo. Besides quoting it in the text
of his book, _The True Science of Living_, Dr. Dewey places it in
capital letters in the frontispiece of his book. He calls it Nature's
Bill of Fare for the Sick; and he shows that in illness, when we are
using up the materials accumulated in our bodies, we may use as much as
99 per cent. of our fat (practically all of it), that of muscle we may
use as much as 30 per cent., that the spleen may waste to the extent of
63 per cent., the liver as much as 56 per cent., and the blood itself be
absorbed to the extent of 17 per cent. of its total amount. But even
when wasting to this extent has occurred the curious and significant
fact is emphasized that the _brain and nerve-centres may not have wasted
at all_. The controlling nervous system thus does not lose its powers
till the very last. Generally, however, the wasting process does not
require to be carried to the very last, the chronic inflammatory deposit
(and in rare cases even a cancerous infiltration) being absorbed and got
rid of before this point is reached.

"As most, if not all, of the chronic diseases depend upon the deposition
of waste, unassimilated materials in various situations; or, in other
words, depend upon a blocking of the local circulation in this way, a
little wholesome starvation is generally of vast benefit by inducing
the economy to use up some of its waste stuff. Nature herself points the
way to us in this matter, because when things have gone as far as she
can bear, and when, were things to go on in the same way, death must
ensue, she generally throws the patient into bed with a digestive system
entirely disorganized, taking away all appetite for food and all power
of assimilation for the time being. We may, in such circumstances, do
much harm by efforts too persistently made to feed our patients; but
generally they refuse all sustenance for some time. After a while (Dr.
Dewey does not seem to be afraid if his patients refuse all food even
for as long on some occasions as thirty days continuously, or even
longer) they right themselves, the tongue cleans, appetite returns, the
power of assimilation is reestablished, and recovery takes place. It
strikes me as somewhat curious (and yet, if we both look at the facts of
life candidly and impartially, perhaps it is not curious) that observers
so wide apart, and in circumstances so very different as the conditions
of human life must be in Yorkshire from what they are in Pennsylvania,
should come to conclusions so practically similar as Dr. Dewey and the
writer have reached."

Gentlemen, masters in the medical profession, to what good end are you
pumping food into human stomach, where there is no hunger and no mind
left to know the need? Is it to maintain that strength which costs you
so much muscle at every feeding. Or is it that it would be a danger to
lose a few pounds of body while Nature gets ready to ask for food in
the gentlest and most persuasive way? Whatever there is in appeal to the
best in any human life to uplift it from the deepest depths, you have at
the readiest command. You seem amply equipped to reach everything but
those sick, afflicted, oppressed brain-centres. You treat everything but
these, but to these you are worse than the Egyptian task-masters in that
you force needless labor where rest alone is the need. It is not bricks
without straw, but labor with exhausted power; and for all your efforts
you simply maintain weight at a tremendous cost to the energy of cure.
In no class of patients is rest for the brain more indicated than in
yours; in none are the means so at command and the results for good so
promising. With your patients the importance of time for business or
social use is no more a concern; the abnormal is all due to disease.

Let us consider those rooms of bedlam you call the "excitable wards."
They who enter leave all hope (of the friends) behind. Is there special
need in these regions of despair and mental chaos that the mere pounds
and strength shall be kept up? What will be lost by protracted fasts?
Nothing in the kitchen. As for the brain and those sick centres, they
will feed themselves until the last heart-beat sends the last available
nourishment to the remotest cell. Will the functions of the brain grow
more abnormal by a suspension of digestive drafts upon it? Does rest to
anything that is tired tend to the abnormal?

Again I ask, What will be lost by protracted fasts in such cases?
Nothing but weight, of which the fat will be by far the larger part.
Would there be worry about starvation? With most of the cases there is
not mind enough to worry over anything from the standpoint of reason.
The very fact of the absence of the sense of the importance of daily
food would render fasts in the highest degree practical and successful.

The fasts could be instituted with the certainty of a calmer condition
of mind as soon as the digestive tract would cease to call upon the
brain for power, and with the probability that a surprising degree of
improvement would be manifest in all, and long before the available
body-food for the brain would be exhausted.

Gentlemen, you have treated acute sickness in all its forms, and you
have had many cases in which, because of irritable stomachs, neither
food nor medicine could be given. Day after day you have seen the
wasting of the bodies, and you have also seen mental aberration or
stupor lessen day by day as the disease lessened its grasp upon the
brain-centres, and finally when the point of natural hunger was reached,
you never found the lost pounds a matter of physical discomfort or
mental abnormality or weakness; rather you have always found at this
point a mental condition in every way the most highly satisfactory. I
never saw brighter eyes, a happier expression on every line, than
revealed by a woman after a fast of forty-four days, in which acute
disease had reduced the weight forty pounds.

All overweight not due to dropsy or other disease is due to eating more
food than the waste demands. As an abnormal condition overweight has
received a great deal of attention in the way of misguided effort to
both prevention and cure. These efforts are such conspicuous failures
that even the patent medicine man has not found his "anti-fat nostrums"
the happy means to fortune. There have been all kinds of limits built
around bills of fare, but sooner or later Nature revolts and they are
given up.

The reason that certain people take on weight easily and become "stout,"
is because of constitutional tendency, good digestion, and excess of
food. As a general fact, the overweights are "large feeders," and they
not only look well but feel well, for they have much less stomach
trouble than the average mortal, and in cheerful endowment of soul they
rank the highest among all the people.

In spite of my philosophy, I, who am one of the leanest of the kind,
look upon the stoutness of those in the early prime of life with
something of both envy and admiration; they seem so ideally conditioned
to enjoy the best of all things on earth. But it is quite a serious
matter when the muscles and brain have to deal with pounds in excess by
the score, even as if the victim were doomed to wear clothes padded with
so many pounds of shot.

Why some people take on fat easily even with the smallest of meals, why
some of the largest eaters are of the leanest, are matters to talk about
but not to know about. For my purpose it is sufficient that I assert
that overweight can be prevented by an habitual limitation of the daily
food to the daily need; that it can be cut down to any desired degree by
stopping the supply, a method that is not attended with any violence to
the constitution, nor even to comfort or power. This plan has the great
advantage of adding to the curative energy of disease as well; and more
than this, there is a change attending the loss that seems at first
phenomenal, as involving a physiological contradiction--there is an
actual increase in muscle-weight as the bloat and fat weight go down.

How is this, you ask? Here is the explanation: As the fat weight
increases by surplus food, so decrease the disposition and ability for
general exercise. As it declines, so do muscle and all the other
energies increase, and the use of muscle within physiological limit
tends to restore the normal weight and strength.

There are no overweights who would not receive the greatest benefit by a
fast that would diminish the pounds to that of the ripest maturity of
life, a fast that would be determined by the time required to reach the
desired number of pounds. As a means this method is available to all,
and practical where due physiological light will enable it to be carried
out with no starving concern to disable vital power.

As a general fact, the No-breakfast Plan has been attended by a highly
satisfactory reduction of surplus pounds; where there has been a failure
it has been due to such an increase of digestive power as really to add
to both an increase of the average amount of daily food and of power to
digest it. For instance, one of my fellow citizens, weighing not less
than three hundred and thirty pounds some years ago, gave up his morning
meals. This was attended with entire relief from frequent bilious
spells; but the average of daily food was increased and the business of
a barber did not add anything to muscle development. Finally from mere
excess of weight he became a prisoner to his house and yard, unable to
walk a square without the greatest difficulty; and yet there were two
enormous meals put into a stomach daily that did not complain, and the
weight increased until the three hundred and seventy-five pound notch
was nearly reached. He heard about the Rathbun fast, and I was able to
persuade him to come down to one light meal daily, and day after day
bonds were loosened. After a year there have been nearly seventy-five
pounds lost, and there is ability to labor and to walk several miles
daily.

Very many thin persons have gained as high as forty pounds by reason of
the larger degree of muscle exercise. Since last writing, this word has
come from Miss K., who one year ago was at the asylum eating several
meals a day in bed with suicidal intent. She left that bed with a weight
of one hundred and forty pounds, and, as I have mentioned before, lost
twenty pounds of it by her fast. My last news is from a letter written
the day after a twenty-five-mile ride among the mountains with a soul as
free and joyous as there are freedom and joy with the birds whose songs
greeted her rapt ears from every treetop. She writes of a gain of
twenty-four pounds since the fast, and states that the glasses she has
worn for thirteen years are wanted no longer!

I feel that I need not multiply words as to the ability and utility of
bringing all overweight down to the physiological normal and of keeping
it there. I could fill hundreds of pages with the joyous testimonies of
those who have been relieved of many surplus pounds, with numerous
accompanying ailings; they all tell the same story, and I will only add
this, that there is no physiological excuse for any mortal to carry
around weight that disables.

Not very many months ago ex-Governor Flower, of New York, a statesman of
national fame, a man of largest public spirit, a most valuable citizen,
and Colonel Robert Ingersoll, an orator of world-wide fame and of great
nobility of soul, dropped as beeves beneath the stroke of an ax because
of a fracture of brittle bloodvessels. In both of these cases not many
less pounds than a hundred had needlessly accumulated.

Could I have had the Colonel's ear when I last saw him as a listener to
almost matchless oratory, whose rotundity of belt was to be measured by
the yard, I would have addressed him as follows: "My dear Colonel, when
I last saw you you were just filled out enough to be the joy of your
tailor, and as a picture of health in form and looks you were ideal. You
were then eating the meals of a woodchopper; and merely because food
tastes good and does not seem to hurt you, you have been doing the same
during the nearly score and a half of years since I have seen you. You
have been eating more food every day in proportion to general muscle
exercise than the hardest toiler does in a week, and your vast bulk
evidences against you."

After explaining to him the structural possibilities of apoplexy as a
legacy, as I have to you in the cases of insanity, I would continue:
"Now by virtue of a possible ancestral weakness of your brain arteries
this may happen: the arterial walls, because of habitual food in excess,
may undergo a fatty, limy degeneration that will make a rupture
possible, with death or paralysis of one-half or more of the body as the
direct result; or the small arteries may have their walls so thickened
as not to permit enough blood to circulate in order duly to nourish
parts of the brain they supply; hence softening of the structure and
more or less imbecility.

"The history of all overweights is that of a decline of muscle energy,
and very generally of the amount of muscle activity as the pounds and
years increase; but no cut in the amount of daily food so long as it can
be taken with relish and disposed of without any special protesting from
the stomach. This is the history of by far the largest majority of
those sudden deaths due to cerebral hemorrhage, and also the history of
most of the cases of imbecility with the overweights.

"Now, Colonel, you should make a radical parting with those surplus
pounds by a fast that may extend into months, or take one of the
lightest of meals once a day. Follow this out rigidly until you have
lost a hundred pounds, and then by as much will you be not only free
from disease, but free also from the danger of disease."

My experience with cases of epilepsy, or "fits," is confined to a half
dozen cases, in which permanent relief seems to be assured. There is an
acquired structural abnormality behind the spasms, acquired from surplus
food, with a cure to be reached ultimately in most cases along these
physiological lines.




XIV.


I shall not take time in telling the evils of alcoholics. It would not
be more enlightening were I to spend hours in telling of wrecked lives,
of wrecked homes, of prisons filled with their victims, of the immense
loss to states and nations from the loss to sufferers and the loss they
inflict. Alcoholism has no sense for frowning, ominous statistics, for
it is a disease to be rationally treated, a disease to be rationally
avoided.

In the light of later science the word "stimulants" has become a
misnomer as applied to alcoholics; the term, no doubt, came into use
from the fact that under their use there is more endurance to both
physical and mental ills, an endurance or indifference ascribed to
stimulation.

If power is stimulated by their use, then there should be a rise in
temperature whereby severe cold is better endured; but this is not the
fact any more than that temperature is lowered whereby extreme heat is
endured; in either case the endurance is due to benumbed brain-centres.
The alcoholic simply lessens the power to suffer mentally or physically;
hence in degree it is an anaesthetic, and as such it also affects the
moral sense and lessens the power of reason and judgment. They are
habitually taken for no other reason than for the temporary relief they
give to some ill of life.

It seems the very depths of total depravity when there is no bread for
the hungry family, that the price of a loaf will rather be spent for a
drink; but it is not so much moral depravity as depravity of
brain-substance. The lethal drink is taken because without it there is
more acute suffering than from the want of a loaf of bread by the entire
family. In my practice an ordinarily sober father would always get drunk
and stay drunk while any member of his family was sick, and for the sole
reason that he could not endure the worry of apprehension. This was not
so much depravity as an acute sense of the suffering and danger
involved, a painful rousing of the best instincts of the soul, those
instincts that raise man above the brute and make him the noblest work
of the divine hand. That is not a bad man at heart who has such a sense
of affection for his wife or child when they seem dangerously sick that
he must have artificial aid to endurance; and if you shall detect the
alcoholic odor in his breath at the funeral you may know that there is
heart agony under repression.

The fact that alcoholics are anaesthetics, and not stimulants, has become
known to a few of the scientists in the medical profession; but it can
scarcely be said to have become known to the profession generally. That
the habitual drinker partakes for any other reason than to drown his
woes that will not stay drowned, and that the drowning is not
stimulation, do not need argument.

The alcoholic in proportion to its strength is mental chaos and
paralysis to power, and it has not the virtue to contain an atom that
can be converted into a living atom. In not the least sense is it a
tissue-builder, and its use by the medical profession is without the
shadow of a reason, and is all the more reprehensible in cases of shock.

Let us see: shock in degree is brain paralysis; alcoholics in degree are
brain paralyzers; shock is simply a state of exhaustion with rest the
supreme need. All the rousement that is necessary and that can avail
will be called into action by the need of oxygen. There are cases of
disease in which breathing goes on hour after hour, when the soul seems
to have departed and with it every life sense. The patient has become
dead beyond reviving, and yet breathes hour after hour. Now can one for
one moment think that an alcoholic can add to the power of the
respiratory centres of the brain to respond to the calls for oxygen and
so prolong life? Shock in its gravest degree is to be considered the
extreme of the tired-out condition, with rest the only restorative
means; and rest may be permitted with the certainty that for mere
breathing purposes alcoholics are dangerous in proportion to the gravity
of the shock.

In health the alcoholic only adds discomfort, because there are no
complaints to soothe; hence it is the duty of every mother so to train
her sons in health-habits that those first drinks will be discouraging
because they bring no cheer of contrast, but rather sensations that are
not suggestive of a better physical condition.

Alcoholics have a corroding effect upon the mucous membrane of the
stomach, a congestive effect by which the glands are subjected to
starving pressure; hence their use always disables the mere mechanics
and the chemistry involved in digestion, and so prolongs disease, and
this applies to all medicines that corrode. This corroding power of the
alcoholics upon the walls of the stomach and its paralyzing effect upon
the brain-centres, with the additional fact that there is nothing in it
that adds force to any life power or that can be converted into living
atoms, should make its use in the stomach of the sick a crime scarcely
to be excused by ignorance.

The evolution of the drunkard is a process of culture, and involves
something of a constitutional tendency as in other diseases. I conceive
that there is an alcoholic temperament, or a temperament in which the
inability to bear with patience the various mental and physical woes of
life is marked even from childhood. Indigestion and every cause that
lowers vital power only add to the importance of such a nervous system.

The first step in the evolution of the drunkard is the first untimely
meal drawn from the breast of the mother. By irregular nursings and the
nursings merely to stop crying the nervous system is continually
overtaxed. There are the untimely meals to prevent gluttony; there are
the between-meal lunches to incite nervousness, irritability, a feeling
of unrest that nothing seems to satisfy.

This goes on year after year until the time comes when that first drink
has power to soothe many discordant voices, and the die is cast. Other
drinks follow, with each to lessen the power of the dynamo and to
disable the machine. At first, drink is indulged not without a sense of
wrongdoing, but with that feeling of power in reserve to keep within the
limits of safety.

The gradual corrosion of the stomach adding to the labors of the brain
in the matter of food mass decomposition as well as digestion marks the
decline of power to abstain and the degradation of every sense that
makes life worth living. Now add to the corrosion of the membrane and
the paralysis of the brain-centres from alcoholics the other inciting
causes in the culture of disease, and you have the evolution of the
drunkard.

How is he to be cured? Only through a fast that shall let that diseased
stomach become new from regeneration, that will let the brain accumulate
rest in reserve. For a time you will need to have him under bonds, for
his will power is abolished. Put him where there will be deaf ears to
the cries of morbid nature, for there is to be a conflict at first; but
long before hunger will come the storm will subside; and finally, when
food will be really desired, there will be a new stomach and a new brain
to which an alcoholic will be no temptation.

This is no figure of speech, because there is such a continual change of
life and death going on in the soft tissues of the body that in a month
or more of fasting it may be assumed that much of the tissues which is
left has undergone reconstruction, and both brain and stomach act as if
they are new when the time comes to restore the lost pounds.

The ways of the kitchen and dining-room are the ways of disease and
death, ways whose ends are prisons, asylums, scaffolds, to a far larger
extent than is dreamed of by the fathers and mothers of the land. A new
crusade against intemperance, the intemperance of the dining-room, is
the only one that will ever settle this so-called liquor question. The
rum-seller will only pull down his sign through the starvation of his
business.

With brains and stomachs kept in the highest order, the alcoholic has
only the least power of the beguiling kind; it is rather a dose whose
effects do not invite repetition. But for all who have the drink disease
seemingly beyond hope a fast of a month, or two months if necessary,
will cure any stomach or brain, no matter how pickled they are with
alcoholic soaking, and with only the least disturbance in the habit
breaking; even within a week the hardest of the fighting should be over
when the fast is made absolute.




XV.


I have now to consider briefly a most distressing disease, one that
perhaps was never cured by the power of doses, and that most happily
illustrates the structural changes in the cure of disease.

Asthmatic distress is caused by congestion of the terminals of the
bronchial tubes, by which entrance of air into the cells is made
difficult, even in some cases to the point of suffocation. This
condition as a disease may be called bronchial catarrh, as in most cases
there is such a condition of the larger tubes as to cause the habitual
raising of a discharge. As to the disease itself, you have only to
recall what has been said about nasal catarrh in order to understand its
origin and development. It would be as trivial a disease were it not for
the fact that those smaller and ultimate tubes, because of flabby walls
and weak vessels, become congested, with resulting narrowing of the
air-ways of life.

For this most distressing disease local treatments are as futile and
void of intelligence as the physiology and anatomy involved in cause and
cure of other local diseases. Is it not a great thing that those too
narrow ways of life may be reached through a fast which shall so charge
the brain with power that the flabby walls will be condensed; that most
cases of asthma may be cured, with marked relief for every case? This
is as certain as a result, as that rest restores strength. With the
toning of the brain through rest, a catarrh of the bronchial tubes is
certainly curable in most cases. With a large opportunity to know I am
able to say this with intense conviction.

Only a few months ago, just before the break of day, a freight train
took a side track; in a few moments, with nearly a mile-a-minute speed,
a limited passenger train took the same track, and in the time of a
second five men were hurled into eternity. Why? How? The conductor and
his brakeman were in such heavy sleep when the switch was opened that
they were not awakened to close it.

Why? How? There was the torpor of indigestion holding the tired brains
of those two men in its fatal grasp; their stomachs were full of food
when they were already tired out by their long trip that was nearly at
its close, and for them those untimely meals were the last.

Of all men who ought to work with empty stomachs for the sake of the
best possible reach of the memory it is the railroad engineer and
conductor; so also every man who is in any way responsible for the
safety of the trains. If we had the history of all the derailments,
collisions, of cars with human freight converted into funeral pyres, a
frightful percentage of them could be traced to where "some one had
blundered" because of the torpor from handling meals when the brain was
compelled to higher services. Digestive, indigestive torpor is also
torpor of the sense of _responsibility_.

In the city where I live is the point between two divisions of the Erie
Railroad, each somewhat more than a hundred miles long. Before I began
the agitation of the No-breakfast Plan all trainmen felt that filling
their stomachs was the last duty before entering upon their taxing
trips, and tired wives would have to get up at all times of the night to
prepare general meals. In this city a mighty revolution for the good of
wives, for the good of men themselves, and for the safety of the trains
and the hapless passengers has been going on for some years.

In former times when these men came home from their rounds generally
tired out, and with a feeling that in proportion to the sense of
exhaustion was the need to eat, general meals had to be prepared at any
time of night. All this is changed in a large measure. Trainmen have
been finding out that the less food in their stomachs they take into bed
with them and on to their trains, the better it is for them in every
way.

More and more they are getting into the way of having a general meal
when they can eat it with leisure and leisurely digest it; and I predict
that a time will come when all who are in any way responsible for the
running of trains will have to know how to take care of their stomachs,
in order that they shall attain and maintain the highest efficiency for
services where human lives so much depend on the best there is in
memory, reason, and judgment. This will be a part of their preparatory
education.

The "block system" has wonderfully added to the safety of the trains,
but there should be a block system added to the stomachs of the
dispatchers and all whose duties are so grave as the handling of human
freight. There is no division so long that it cannot be doubled with
less fatigue and better mental condition if the stomach be not on duty
at the same time. In this I speak with the authority that comes from the
study of the experiences of trainmen during many years: with one accord
they speak of their trips as taken with clearer heads and stronger
muscles than when large meals were thought a necessity while on duty.

With an empty stomach it takes a very long time to get into such
torpor--drowsiness--as compels the after-dinner sleep. That engineer who
once told me of such sleepiness as made him nod while on duty was not
suffering from either lack of sleep or overwork of his body: it was
simply a case of the torpor of indigestion, and this was when there was
no block system to lessen the danger of such services.

There is a great deal of imperfection in what man does for man that
comes from the indifference arising from the torpor of untimely food,
and far more than there is any conception in what man does against man
from the destruction of power in this way.

There is now one of the Erie conductors who five years ago was losing
at least half of his time from asthma; there is another who was equally
disabled from sudden head symptoms that would immediately disable. These
men have lost no trips since they began to run their stomachs with the
same care as their trains. And there is an engineer whose trips to the
physician and to the drug-store for many years were as frequent as those
to his engine. There has since been a half dozen years of wiser care of
his stomach, and his wife says that the change for the better in his
disposition is beyond description. These men have rendered far more
service, and who cannot see that these services have been of far higher
character for the company, and that they have been infinitely better
husbands, fathers, and citizens?

The following case will interest trainmen: D. S., a brakeman, reached
the burden of two hundred and forty-six pounds, with resulting
breathlessness and other ailings that taxed all his resources to perform
his duties. He was induced to cut down his daily food as the only means
for relief, and to add to his strength. It took him a long time to
master the fact that his strength was not kept up by food, but the
gradual loss of weight with the general improvement made this more and
more evident. He finally reached a time when he was able to make his
round trip of one hundred and ninety-six miles without a morsel of food
the while, and with much less fatigue than when there was a midnight
meal from a lunch-pail. Within a year the weight has gone down to one
hundred and eighty-eight pounds. To my professional eye there is beauty
in the bright eyes, in the condensed, smooth face, in the body enfolded
with clothes that flap in the breeze like the sails of a ship. No
accident will happen to precious human freight through his brain kept
free from digestive torpor while on duty.

Ever since my book has been out I have been in more or less trouble with
cases that badly needed my personal care, and not few in which death was
inevitable. For instance, there is a woman in Illinois who has been
ailing for years, and in spite of the No-breakfast Plan has had to take
to her bed with acute aversion to food. Medical art had utterly failed
before she changed her dietary methods.

Her dietary views are known, and so she is held in severe censure
because the sick stomach is not compelled to a futile service; and
though I am informed of an enlargement in the region of the bowels that
has been perceptible and tender for years, her death will be considered
suicidal from _starvation_.

A Warrensburg, Ill., editor began his fast by throwing up his food and
continued it to the end; yet because he had talked about a fast it was
supposed to be a case of suicide of the stupid kind; and though the
post-mortem revealed a diseased gall-bladder, the doctors who made it
did nothing to lessen the suicidal impression, and the death from
"starvation" appeared under large headlines in the public prints.

When men as learned, able, and eminent as Dr. Shrady, of New York, go
into print to inform the public that people may starve to death in ten
days, and when such men as Prof. Wood, of the University of
Pennsylvania, do not see any starvation in the wasting pounds of acute
disease, the care of acute sickness as Nature would have it is a grave
matter for the physician.

In five fatal cases under my care in which there was no possibility of
feeding, there was such agitation over the question of starvation as
would have subjected me to violence had my city been nearer the equator.
In all these cases I was compelled to have a post-mortem to silence
heathen raging. In one case in which a young man had died after weeks of
inability to take food, even one of my medical brethren carried the
conviction with him for years, and without seeking to inform himself,
that there was a death from starvation. In this case there were spells
of hunger in a fury, when meals would be taken, only to be soon thrown
up, and he finally took to his bed to starve slowly to death. There was
mind enough left to make a will, though the body had lost apparently
more than half the normal weight; the post-mortem revealed a stomach
seared, thickened, and not more than a third of the normal size.

The physiology of fasting in time of sickness is so entirely new to the
medical world that every death that occurs with those who practise it is
certain to be attributed to starving.

Early in this year (1900) a woman of seventy, in high circles, died from
an obscure stomach trouble. For thirty-eight days there averaged nearly
a half-dozen spells of vomiting; and yet it was generally believed that
it was clearly a case of death from starvation, believed by those whose
power to receive impressions is far stronger than their power to
consider.

Fasting, because it is Nature's plan, will win the victory in all cases
in which victory is possible; and yet wherever it is adopted, to become
known about, there will be the same confusion of tongues as would be
were violent hands laid upon gods of wood and stone in heathen temples.
"Starved to death" is the verdict.

Fasting during sickness, because of the vast utility and from the
impetus arising from the cases in Philadelphia, is bound to spread as by
contagion; but when death occurs, all friends involved will be charged
as abettors of homicide. To be fair to the opposition, and to let all
readers know what chances for public censure will be theirs, whenever
they see fit to let their friends recover on Nature's plan or die
natural deaths, the following case is given. I quote from the
Philadelphia _Press_ of May 7, 1900:

    "In the death notices of April 26 appeared the name of Mrs.
    Hermina Meyer, fifty years of age, of 1233 North Howard Street.
    At the time this short and simple record of the passing away of
    an ordinary, obscure woman attracted no more attention than the
    hundred similar names that constituted the necrological annals
    of April 25. But there is a startling aftermath that at once
    gives significance to this brief record, and rude and bitter
    awakening to the followers of the so-called 'Starvation Cult,'
    that has gained a considerable acceptance in the northeast
    section of the city.

    "Mrs. Meyer was a believer in the fasting treatment. She was
    apparently a victim of this strange and heretical therapeutical
    faith. Kensington is buzzing with gossip concerning the
    deplorable death of the unfortunate woman. C. F. Meyer, the
    husband of the victim, accepts the death of his wife as due to
    heart-failure, and apparently is not disposed to complain.

    "Mr. Meyer talked freely with a _Press_ reporter yesterday
    concerning the sickness and death of his wife. He said that Mrs.
    Meyer had been ill for about a year, her malady having been
    diagnosed as chronic rheumatism. She had been treated by the
    family physician for this disease, but without relief. In
    despair she turned to the fasting treatment.

    "From time to time she had read of the remarkable cures claimed
    to have been effected by complete abstention from food. Through
    a friend she met and talked with the family of Leonard Thress,
    of 2618 Frankford Avenue, whose case is proclaimed as one of the
    most remarkable that had been successfully treated by the
    fasting system. Thress was widely advertised as a victim of
    dropsy, who, after a complete fast of more than a month, was
    restored to sound health.

    "Mrs. Meyer believed, and sent for Henry Ritter, the chief
    advocate and adviser of the fasting cult in Philadelphia. His
    belief in the weird treatment of disease he has adopted is
    seemingly unshakable.

    "Ritter has superintended many cases of starvation treatment,
    wherein, according to his own statements, the patients have
    totally abstained from actual food for periods of from four to
    six weeks. He claims that in every case the afflicted person has
    completely recovered health--with the single exception of Mrs.
    Meyer.

    "In response to her request, Ritter called upon Mrs. Meyer. She
    at once began her fast. Nothing was allowed to pass her lips but
    a small quantity of tonicum and some physiological salts,
    dissolved in water. Of each of these she was permitted to take
    sparingly every day. It is claimed by Ritter, a fact well-known
    to physiologists, that there is no actual food in either of
    these thin condiments. They are simply stimulants. These
    liquids, according to Ritter, are the only things given to any
    of the patients whose cases he has supervised.

    "For twenty-five days, so says Mr. Meyer, his wife fasted and
    improved. At the expiration of that time, he says, her health
    was very much improved. She was able to walk about her room, a
    thing she had not been able to do for many weeks. Then there was
    a sudden and violent change for the worse. The patient was
    seized with convulsive vomiting.

    "For sixteen days she suffered the excruciating pains of these
    convulsions. But, under Ritter's advice, Mrs. Meyer continued
    her fast. Till the thirty-fifth day she tasted no food. The
    vomiting continued unabated. On the thirty-sixth day she felt a
    craving for food for the first time since her long fast began.
    She was given oatmeal porridge. But the vomiting continued
    unabated.

    "She grew weaker and weaker. From one hundred and fifty pounds
    weight she was reduced to a gaunt skeleton. When, upon the
    resumption of a food diet, the vomiting did not cease, the
    family was alarmed. The family physician was sent for in dismay.
    But he could do nothing. Flesh-building foods were prescribed,
    but they accomplished nothing. The vomiting continued, and three
    weeks following the breaking of the fast Mrs. Meyer died.

    "The death was put down to a depleted blood-supply, or
    heart-failure. Ritter claimed that this unexpected turn could
    not have been anticipated, as the fact that the patient was
    subject to heart disease was previously unknown.

    "He had treated her for rheumatism, and the cure was apparently
    in sight when heart-failure carried the patient to her grave.

    "These facts were detailed by Mr. Meyer. He added that Mr.
    Ritter was not a physician; that he charged no fees; that he did
    not claim to prescribe remedies, but only advised.

    "So ends the case of Mrs. Hermina Meyers, first victim of the
    starvation cult."

The following is from the _Press_ of May 8:

    "The death of Mrs. Hermina Meyer, after undergoing the fasting
    treatment for thirty-five days, has not at all shaken the faith
    of the adviser responsible for the ordeal, Henry Ritter, who
    claims to have restored tireless persons to health. He affirmed
    that the ravages of chronic disease had progressed too far for
    his treatment to conquer them, and that his attendance was
    advised by the family physician.

    "Against this comforting declaration, however, stands the fact
    that the certificate of death, signed by Dr. James Chestnut,
    Jr., gave as the cause prolonged abstinence from food; in other
    words, _starvation_. Dr. Chestnut also has stated that the case
    was taken out of his hands, and Ritter installed as medical
    adviser, by what was virtually a dismissal. Dr. Chestnut was
    summoned again when the condition of the woman became critical,
    after twenty-five days of fasting, but she became rapidly weaker
    with violent convulsions and vomiting, and was beyond medical
    aid.

    "She had never been treated for cancer of the stomach, which
    Ritter says he thinks she may have had, although she had a
    valvular affection of the heart which had existed for some time.
    But the fact that the cause of her death was officially attested
    by the family physician as due to her long fast contradicts
    flatly the position taken by the self-constituted healer, who
    made the following statement last night:

    "'I have seen all the members of Mrs. Meyer's family to-day, and
    they are entirely satisfied that my treatment was in no way
    responsible for her death. I was called in at their urgent
    request, as their own relatives were numbered among the cures to
    the credit of the fasting treatment, as well as Mr. Thress. I
    accept no money for my work; they knew it was a labor of love,
    and the family physician, Dr. Chestnut, agreed with them as to
    the advisability of this system which they had seen tested.

    "'Mrs. Meyer improved rapidly for a time, her chronic rheumatism
    causing her less trouble than in years, after the first three
    weeks of fasting. She had been treated previously for catarrh of
    the stomach, and it is probable that a cancer afflicted her. I
    am using no new system. The method has been used with very
    notable success by Dr. Edward H. Dewey, of Meadville, whose
    reputation and standing are distinguished. This is the first
    case I have lost out of twelve patients who had been given up as
    hopeless by regular physicians. It is Nature's cure, nothing
    more; but it was applied too late in the case of Mrs. Meyer.'

    "Dr. Chestnut would not allow himself to be quoted because of
    the rigid rules of medical ethics. It may be stated, however, in
    addition to what has been said, that he does not wish to be
    considered as having encouraged the experiment, and that the
    death certificate defined his view of the responsibility."

A verdict on the part of the doctor _without a post-mortem_.

Against the doctor is the following, from the daughter, Miss Kate Meyer.
I quote from an article in the _North American_ of May 8, 1900:

    "Mrs. Hermina Meyer, devotee of an odd cult, that regards
    starvation as a sure cure for all bodily ills, fasted for nearly
    forty days because she was suffering from rheumatism.

    "The rheumatism disappeared.

    "But after twenty-five days of total abstinence from food she
    sickened. Violent nausea came to her. She died.

    "Nevertheless, Miss Kate Meyer, daughter of the dead woman,
    says:

    "'My mother did not die because she fasted. The fasting did her
    good. When she began it she had been ill with rheumatism for
    more than a year. She could hardly walk. Her left arm was
    powerless. She could not lift it from her side. After two weeks
    of fasting she was active. She could walk. The power came back
    to her arm. She suffered little pain. She looked well. Then came
    the attacks of nausea.

    "'But Dr. Chestnut, who is our family physician, was attending
    mother all the time. He called once a week. He said himself that
    the fast cure seemed to be doing mother good. When she got
    nausea he did not lay it to her fasting. He said it was heart
    trouble. That's what mother died of. Dr. Chestnut said so.

    "'Do you remember the case of Leonard Thress? He cured himself
    of dropsy by fasting. Mother heard of it. She was introduced to
    Mr. Thress. He told her that all he knew of the fast cure he had
    learned from Henry Ritter. Mother sent and asked Mr. Ritter
    about the cure. Then she began it. Mr. Ritter never charged
    mother for anything. Dr. Chestnut consented that mother should
    try the Ritter cure.'

    "Mrs. Meyer was the wife of Charles F. Meyer, of 1233 North
    Howard Street. Meyer, like his daughter, has only friendliness
    for Ritter, and also favors the fast cure. Mrs. Meyer, past
    middle age, had been sorely tried by her ailment. For more than
    a year Dr. Chestnut attended her, but her condition did not
    improve. Prescription after prescription was tested, only to
    fail.

    "'There is little hope for me,' said the woman to her daughter.
    'I'm tired of taking medicines. They do me no good.'

    "She became more melancholy as the days passed. She regarded her
    case as hopeless. Dr. Chestnut acknowledged defeat. He had only
    a change of climate--a long stay in Colorado--to recommend. A
    very domestic woman was Mrs. Meyer. She looked with horror upon
    a journey. She said she would remain at home and die.

    "But one day last March there gathered at a banquet in the home
    of Leonard Thress about a dozen persons, very happy, very
    healthy (or believing themselves to be so), all members of the
    'starvation cure' cult.

    "Each had to tell the story of a long fast that brought a
    remarkable cure. Newspapers gave publicity to the dinner of the
    little band with the odd faith in fasting. Mrs. Meyer heard of
    it. Here was a chance--a gleam of hope! She came to know Leonard
    Thress, and, through him, Henry Ritter, the apostle of the fast
    cure. He told her of remarkable recoveries. She caught his
    enthusiasm.

    "But, according to Mr. Meyer, the young man was careful first
    that the family physician should consent. He never hinted at
    compensation for his services; never got it. Aside from advising
    total abstinence from food, he supplied small quantities of
    tonicum and salts dissolved in water. These contained no food
    matter; they were merely stimulative.

    "In two weeks hope was strong with Mrs. Meyer; with all the
    family. Certainly, she was improving. She could walk; her arm
    that had been stiff and painful moved with ease--hurt no more.
    She still suffered occasional twinges, and decided to continue
    her self-imposed starvation until every rheumatic germ in her
    body was eradicated.

    "She regarded herself as almost cured, when, after twenty-five
    days, she was attacked with nausea. She was very ill. It lasted
    sixteen days. After the first few days of fasting all desire for
    food had vanished. But on the thirty-sixth day she was hungry.

    "Oatmeal porridge was given her sparingly. The nausea, however,
    did not cease. She began to grow alarmingly emaciated. She had
    weighed one hundred and fifty pounds. Her weight had fallen to
    one hundred.

    "The family physician prescribed light food, but her stomach
    repulsed it. She grew very weak.

    "On April 26 she died. Dr. Chestnut unhesitatingly issued a
    death certificate, ascribing her death to heart-failure. He also
    suspected a cancer of the stomach, but was not sure.

    "Mrs. Herman Reinhardt, a cousin of the deceased woman, is
    firmly convinced that fasting had nothing to do with her death.

    "'For more than fifteen years Mrs. Meyer suffered from some
    acute stomach trouble,' Mrs. Reinhardt said yesterday, 'and it
    is my belief that it caused her death. Her general health had
    been greatly benefited by abstaining from all food, but the
    disorder from which she suffered most could not be cured. My
    husband fasted for twenty-five days and was completely cured of
    stomach trouble, and there were no ill effects in his case.'"

The impression of this death and of these fasts upon the minds of the
medical profession was perhaps fairly summed up by the eminent Horatio
C. Wood, M. D., LL. D., Clinical Professor of Nervous Diseases in the
University of Pennsylvania. He disregarded the legal phase of the
question, the question of the legality of a layman dealing out words of
cheer and comfort in cases in which the medical profession had retired
in total defeat. The question had been seriously raised as to whether
Mr. Ritter had not committed a crime against the laws of Pennsylvania,
and for what? For simply advising these people to stop all eating until
there would come a natural desire for food!

Professor Wood thus gave utterance in the _Press_ of May 10:

    "'These people are falsifying,' he said, 'There have been liars,
    you know, and they are not all dead. I don't believe for an
    instant such stories as fasting totally for forty or fifty days
    and keeping up energy and activity. It is contrary to common
    sense as well as to all we know about the human body. I don't
    know the object of deception, but somebody must be making money
    out of it, or having a craving for notoriety. It is
    preposterous. I understand that one of these fasters walked ten
    miles a day, after doing altogether without nourishment for a
    month or so. If these persons did what they claim to have
    undergone, more than one death would have been charged against
    the treatment, you may be sure.

    "'You will remember that the professional forty-day fasters,
    Tanner and Suci, were reduced to mere skin and bone, were almost
    helpless, carefully husbanded every bit of their vital energy,
    and took no exercise. They were _watched_ and studied
    scientifically. And here is a woman, weighing only one hundred
    pounds when she started fasting, claims she began to eat after
    thirty-eight days of starvation, and had more energy and took
    more exercise than in years. It is all amazingly absurd,
    whatever the motive may be.'"

Tanner and Suci, "skin and bones?" Cowen weighed one hundred and
seventy-five pounds when he began his forty-two day fast, and lost only
thirty pounds. My case of acute rheumatism revealed a loss of only
forty pounds after a forty-six days' fast; and the woman of fifty-seven
who began eating on the forty-third day was so well padded with muscle
and fat as not to reveal the slightest suggestion of starvation as she
sat down to the first meal. "Skin and bones?" This is a matter for
months, and not for days.

"Falsifiers, these fasters?" Science settles important questions by
investigation, not by epithet.




XVI.


As I write the closing pages of this book, the most taxing case of
fasting that ever came under my care has ended in hunger, and I insert
it that all may know what tribulations will be theirs if they have any
part in letting their sick get well or die in that peace God and Nature
clearly design for all.

A man of large mould came to me, unknown, unbidden, from a distant city
on the seventeenth day of his fast. His appetite had been abolished by a
severe throat and bronchial attack, both of which had been relieved
before reaching me. Well posted in the theory of fasting, he came with
the declared intention of fasting until hunger or death would come.

For two or three weeks he was able to be about the city with his nearly
two hundred pounds of flesh; but there was an unknown, unknowable
disease of the bowels and stomach in slow development. There were a
dryness of the mouth and such aversion to food as to forbid all eating,
and he was deaf to my suggestion that he should at least taste some of
the liquid foods from time to time, to save me in the eyes of his
friends from a verdict of homicide, were we to fail to win a victory.
After more than fifty days without even a taste of food nausea and
vomiting were added to his woes, and when his friends became aware of
the many days without food no words I could utter saved me from the
severest condemnation. The anxiety that involved the sick bed only
depressed the patient, and when another physician had to be called to
relieve the pressure the last hope with him nearly departed.

The adviser was a man of high character and of unusual general and
professional acquirements. Behind him was the entire medical profession
and all its literature: behind me were only Nature, many-voiced--and the
patient. With us there was no lack of mutual respect, except in matters
of faith and practice; but he no more tolerated my "crankiness,"
lunacy--perhaps imbecility--in withholding food from the sick than I his
paganism in enforcing it. For the sake of the agony of friends my noble
patient accepted one severe dose of medicine and one ration of
predigested food. The instant response of the digestive powers was, "We
have stopped business down here for repairs: when we are ready we will
let you know."

Next a ration of food was sent into the sick bowels, only to cause hours
of pain. The enemy having been expelled with disaster from all points of
attack, there simply had to be a waiting on Nature, and in one day after
the last vomiting spell there was a natural call for food--and this on
the _sixtieth day of the fast!_

Had this man died--such was his prominence--I should have been paraded
as a criminal of the stupid kind in the entire press of America, except
in the papers of my own city. For this man of sixty-five, who with
marvellous faith in Nature patiently waited upon her time, there
promises to be many years of the days of his youth restored to him. As
for me, with authorized medicine driven from the field, I see only new
life unfolding in him daily, and my reward is exceeding.

Men and brethren of the medical profession: This man read his favorite
_Sun_ during every one of those sixty long days, and not one day was
there revealed a hint of mental loss in clearness of apprehension. He
lived because he knew that starving to death was his remotest danger; he
lived also because he was made to see evidences that a cure was evolving
in many ways. There was at no time apprehension, except when he felt
unable to resist his friends with a _No_ in thunder tones when it was
proposed to torture him with drugs and foods.

Brethren, are you going into print to denounce the physiology or the
practicality of this old method in Nature, this new method in humanity,
to the sick and afflicted? Not one of you can advance arguments that
will convince those who reason.

To what good end are you now enforcing your _predigested_ foods? Are
they relished better than other foods? Can they be taken with less
aversion in cases of nausea and vomiting? Do they really nourish the
brain so as to add clearness and strength to the mind? Do they ever
prevent the uncovering of bones that makes the ways of acute sickness?
If food actually can be so digested out of the body as to be ready for
instant absorption, we should be able to abolish our kitchens, and at
once enter upon that golden age in which there would be no dyspepsia
hydraheaded; no disease of any kind, not even drunkenness, and where
death would be only as the last flicker of the burned-up candle.

In this case, as in all other cases, the desire for water was abolished
before hunger became marked. In this connection I will suggest to the
reader that thirst is a morbid condition to be avoided as far as
possible; that water is its only need, and no mortal ever needs a drop
for health's sake except when thirsty. Making water-tanks of human
stomachs is without the shade of physiological reason, and the alleged
results for good are not based on a shade of scientific evidence: these
are based wholly in the minds of the credulous enthusiasts who prescribe
them. Taking large quantities of water without thirst only entails added
work upon the kidneys, and thus it becomes a factor in the development
of Bright's disease and other forms where the tendency exists. The
actual need of water is always made clear in every case; the need always
disappears before hunger can become possible.

As to the use of water on the body, this physiology has to be taken into
account. The skin is covered with scales that are constantly dropping
off as they mature, each to uncover a bright, clean one. As the skin is
not an absorbent membrane, and as old scales are constantly dropping
off, the need of frequent baths is more a need to satisfy the personal
sense of cleanliness than a physiological need. These scales should not
be either soaked off or brushed off in a wholesale way; the oil in the
skin is a protection against weather-changes, and is also a necessity to
its functional integrity, and therefore should not be dissolved and
washed off by soaps that are strongly alkaline.

The body itself is very sensitive to contact with water below the
natural temperature of the skin. The plunge bath is specially depressing
to every human energy, and should never be indulged by the debilitated.
The daily bathings of nursing children are cruel and life-depressing.
Their little bodies are always clean in the physiological sense when
their clothes are kept clean; hence once a week ought to satisfy all
mothers.

The question of how often to bathe must be considered along these
physiological lines. They whose employments soil their clothes and
bodies spend the least time in cleansing their bodies; and yet in no
medical work that treats of diseases and their causes is there to be
found a hint that any special disease has its origin in uncleansed skin
as a chronic condition. That will be a small-minded reader who draws
conclusions from these statements that the author is not highly in favor
of having bodies and clothes kept so habitually clean as not to be an
offence to the finest fibred olfactory nerve at close range. In the
use, then, of water on the body be physiologically sensible, and not the
slaves of the bath-tub or "medicated" waters.

Lay readers, I draw my message to a close. I have addressed it to you
because your minds are open and free. Draw near and listen while I talk
rather than write. Let me look into your eyes, see the play on all the
lines of expression, as I would were you in my consulting-room. Mine has
reached your ears as a lone voice from the depths of some wilderness; I
have tried so to speak with my pen that you could catch an echo as if
from between the lines of every page.

You will not banish your medical adviser, for you still need his
knowledge of the workings of disease, if you do not need the drugs you
formerly believed necessary; but you will now be able in a more
intelligent way to diminish the possibilities of the future need of him.

Since these wonderful fasts in Philadelphia others are occurring over
the country from the contagion of example. Many are certain to be
undertaken as a last resort where hope has departed; and death will
come; and then there will be the confusion of tongues, as in the case of
Mrs. Meyer. Her case has been the third one that I know of where the
press has spread the news of death from starvation.

I have given you the case of Mrs. Meyer that you may know that no matter
how hopeless any case may be considered, no matter how given up by
venders of drugs, if a fast be advised and death come, death from
starvation will be the general verdict. Hence on as fasts multiply, so
will the press continue to make special note of all who chance to die
because they had ceased to add distress to their bodies by foods that
were only taken as the medicinal dose. All this you need to take into
account in those cases you would advise where the medical faculty has
retired in defeat.

Never in my entire professional life have I been so depressed by
discordant voices as during this sixty-day fast just ended. All the air
has been charged, darkened with frownings--even threats of what would
happen in case of death; and as never before has this question come to
me, "Why do the heathen rage and the people imagine vain things?"

Again I must tell you that the No-breakfast Plan, the plan not to eat in
time of health until there are a normal need and desire for food, that
are only developed after several hours of morning labor, and not to eat
at all during acute sickness, is the easiest of all means to maintain
health, and to regain it when lost. In my message I have had the
greatest good for the greatest number of the world's busy people, who
have no time to indulge abnormal, artificial ways in the recovery and
maintenance of health--ways that are a real tax on time and taxing in
the means involved. Passing few are they of the world's workers who
have the time for all this, and especially they who are the slaves of
the kitchen.

Again I must suggest to you that the actual need of daily food as a
matter to meet the actual daily need is a new question in practical
physiology. It may be very much less than is supposed, a matter to be
determined by the scales. There are none who can eat at all with relish
who are not more governed by relish than the hunger sense, as to the
amount of food eaten. The real amount of daily food needed may be so
small that enough of nourishment can be extracted from almost any of the
easiest available foods, the main question being one of slow eating,
restful eating, and with the most thorough mastication. For those who
have the leisure and tastes for study over what to eat there are the
works of Haig, Hoy, Hensel, Sir Henry Thompson, and others, that may be
read with both interest and profit.

And now I address my last words to the mothers of the land. For you the
No-breakfast Plan means the highest possible health, the greatest
possible relief from the slavery of toil. On no other plan are there
such promises of relief and prevention of all your sex ailings. On this
plan only can you become man's equal in the hours of leisure that are
his by a feeling of divine right; you also should consider the
possibilities of a day of eight or ten hours as needing the reduction
all the more because of your weaker bodies.

The No-breakfast Plan means for your children the best possibilities
for the conservation of all the higher instincts and powers that will
tend to save them from the saloon, the prison, the electric chair. If
the Garden of Eden was abolished because you enticed man to eat the
wrong food, it is for you to restore a new race of Adams in all the ways
of health, of such health as will make the entire earth a "Paradise
regained."

Readers, lay and professional, let me reiterate in my parting words,
words at white heat with conviction as to their soundness and utility.
Enforced food is a danger always to be measured by the gravity of the
local or general disease; a danger always to be measured also by the
feebleness of old age--by feebleness no matter how caused.

This physiological righteousness will remain unquestioned, its
practicality unsurpassed, while man remains on the earth to violate the
laws of his Creator manifest in his own body. The penalties of
disobedience are as certain as that every cause is followed by a
definite effect. There are no remissions in the various antitoxins;
there is no hope for you through hollow needles. Nature is exacting, but
she is merciful. Obey her laws that your ways may be toward Paradise,
and not away from it.

[Transcriber's Note: The following words were spelled/hyphenated
inconsistently in the original text and have not been changed:
over-eating, overeating; centre, center; Cowan, Cowen; Suci, Succi.

The following corrections have been made to the original text.

Page 64:
  insistance changed to insistence

Page 65:
  abandaned changed to abandoned -- 'had been abandoned'

Page 67:
  opprobium changed to opprobrium

Page 74:
  constrast changed to contrast -- 'sluggishness by contrast'

Page 122:
  satifsying changed to satisfying -- 'about satisfying it'

Page 160:
  now changed to no -- 'no matter'

Page 186:
  frieght changed to freight -- 'human freight'

Page 191:
  wierd changed to weird -- 'weird treatment']





End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The No Breakfast Plan and the
Fasting-Cure, by Edward Hooker Dewey

*** 