"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.