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.