The same thing is true of vitamins, and of the evils of denatured foods, and the importance of bulk in the diet—we knew all that before Sir Arbuthnot Lane ever addressed a medical congress. As to fasting, I stood the ridicule of my medical friends for twenty years, and then in the files of the Journal of Metabolism I found the records of laboratory tests upon humans as well as dogs proving that the effect of a prolonged fast is a permanent increase in the metabolic rate—which is the same thing as rejuvenation, and exactly what we “health cranks” have claimed.
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.
IX
Harry Kemp came to see us in Battle Creek; he was on his way back to college after a summer’s work on the oreboats of the Great Lakes. He had a suitcase full of manuscripts, an extra shirt, and a heart bubbling over with literary excitements. He met Corydon for the first time and found her interesting; Corydon, for her part, was maternal to a forlorn poet.
The fates wove their webs, unguessed by any of us. It happened that at the Kellogg Institution, just down the street, there was a young lady from the Delta district of Mississippi—she had accompanied her mother and a cousin who were undergoing treatment. Mary Craig Kimbrough was the name of the young lady, and one day when she was walking with her cousin, the cousin remarked, “Would you like to meet an author? There goes Upton Sinclair with his wife.” Said the haughty young lady, “I don’t think he would interest me.” But the cousin insisted. “Oh, come on, I met him the other day, and he’s not so bad as he looks.”
She called the author from across the street, introductions were exchanged, and we chatted for a few minutes. The propagandist author, being just then excited over fasting, and having no manners or tact or taste or anything of that sort, informed an extremely proud young Southern belle that she was far too thin and needed a fast and a milk diet. It was the first time in her whole life that a man had ever addressed her except in the Southern mode of compliment.