VIII
At Macfadden’s institution in Battle Creek were perhaps a hundred patients, faithfully trying out these eccentricities. They fasted for periods long or short; I met one man who went to fifty-five days, attempting a cure for locomotor ataxia—he was beginning to walk, in spite of all the dogmas. Later I met a man who weighed nearly three hundred pounds, who fasted over ninety days, which is the record so far as I know. This was before suffragettes and hunger strikes, and it was the accepted idea that a human being would starve to death in three or four days.
After the fast we went on a thing known as a milk diet, absorbing a glass of fresh milk every half hour, and sometimes every twenty minutes, until we had got up to eight quarts a day. The fasters sat around, pale and feeble in the sunshine, while the milk drinkers swarmed at the dairy counter, and bloomed and expanded and swapped anecdotes—it was a laboratory of ideas, and if you had a new one, no matter how queer, you could find somebody who had tried it, or was ready to try it forthwith. When you came off the milk diet, you might try some odd combination such as sour milk and dates. In the big dining room you were served every sort of vegetarian food. There were dark rumors that the smell of beefsteaks was coming from Macfadden’s private quarters. I asked him about it, and he told me he was trying another experiment.
I met him again when he was sixty; still of the same experimental disposition, he wanted to know what I had learned in twenty years. He then owned a string of magazines and newspapers, I don’t know how many, and I would not venture to imagine how many millions they brought him every year, or the number of his blooming daughters—I think there were eight in a photograph on his desk. He still had his muscles of steel, and would take two packs of cards, put them together, and tear them in half before your eyes. He had been a weakling in his youth, had built up that powerful frame, and would put on bathing trunks and come out on a platform and show it to people; very vulgar, of course—no “ethical” medico would dream of doing it. But it caused great numbers of men and women to take an interest in their health, and it set up resistance to those forces of modern civilization that were destroying the body.
My personal experience has been told in a book, The Fasting Cure, so I will merely say that I took a fast of ten or twelve days, and then a milk diet of three weeks, and achieved a sense of marvelous well-being. My wife did the same, and we became enthusiasts. I took a second fast of a week or so, and when I left the place I had gained about twenty pounds, which I needed. But I did not keep it, for as soon as I left the sanitarium I started on a new book.