There is much prejudice against fasting, but a calm study of the facts will remove this. Typhoid fever, conventionally treated, often proves fatal in 15 per cent. or more of the cases and those who survive have to undergo a long, uncomfortable illness which often leaves them so weakened and with such degenerated bodies that the end is frequently a matter of a few months or years. Pneumonia and tuberculosis find a favorable place to develop and in these cases prove very fatal. On the other hand, cases of typhoid treated by the fast, and the other hygienic measures necessary, recover in a short time, there are no evil sequels and the body is in better condition than it was before the onset of the disease. I have never seen a fatality in a properly treated case, and the mortality is conspicuous by its absence. It is the same in curable chronic diseases. Where feeding and medicating add to the ills, fasting with proper living afterwards brings health.
It is also well to remember that where one individual dies while fasting (not from the effects of fasting, but from the disease for which the fast was begun), perhaps one hundred thousand starve because they have too much to eat. Silly as this may sound, it is the truth, and this is s the explanation: Overfeeding causes digestive troubles and a breakdown of the assimilative and excretory processes. The more food that is taken while this condition exists the less nourishment is extracted from it. The food ferments pathologically, instead of physiologically, and poisons the body. The more that is eaten under the circumstances, the worse is the poisoning and at last the tired body wearily gives up the fight for existence, perhaps after a long chronic ailment has been suffered, or perhaps during the attack of an acute disease. The chief cause of death is too much food.
Avicena, the great Arabian physician, treated by means of prolonged fasts.
For the benefit of those who fear the effects of fasts of a few days' duration a few quotations are given from various sources:
"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."—Dr. E. H. Dewey.
This shows the groundlessness of the fear parents have of allowing their children to fast when necessary. It is beneficial for even the babies who need it. In the cases quoted above the conditions were very unfavorable, for the children were suffering from the effects of lye burns, yet they lived without food seventy-five and ninety days, respectively. If necessary, deprive the children of food, and keep them warm. Then comfort yourself with the fact that they are being treated humanely and efficiently.
Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard, in the latest edition of her book, Fasting for the Cure of Disease, states that she has treated almost two thousand five hundred people by this method, the fasts varying in duration from eight to seventy five days, many of them being over a month. Sixteen of her patients have died while fasting and two on a light diet. This is far from being a mortality of 1 per cent. When the fact is taken into consideration that the people she treated were of the class for whom the average medical man can do nothing the mortality is surprisingly small. However, she has lost a few, and as she is a fighter for her beliefs the prejudice against her and her method of treating disease have proved strong enough to cause her to be imprisoned. Dr. Hazzard has perhaps the widest experience with fasting of any mortal, living or dead. Her book is well worth reading.
Upton Sinclair has also written a book on this subject, entitled the Fasting Cure. He writes from the viewpoint of an intelligent layman whose observations are not very extensive. The book contains many good ideas. This is from page fifty-seven:
"The longest fast of which I had heard when my article was written was seventy eight days; but that record has since been broken, by a man named Richard Fausel. Mr. Fausel, who keeps a hotel somewhere in North Dakota, had presumably partaken too generously of the good cheer intended for his guests, for he found himself at the inconvenient weight of three hundred and eighty-five pounds. He went to a sanatorium in Battle Creek and there fasted for forty days (if my recollection serves me), and by dint of vigorous exercise meanwhile, he got rid of one hundred and thirty pounds. I think I never saw a funnier sight than Mr. Fausel at the conclusion of this fast, wearing the same pair of trousers that he had worn at the beginning of it. But the temptations of hotel-keepers are severe, and when he went back home, he found himself going up in weight again. This time he concluded to do the job thoroughly, and went to Macfadden's place in Chicago, and set out upon a fast of ninety days. That is a new record—though I sometimes wonder if it is quite fair to call it 'fasting' when a man is simply living upon an internal larder of fat."