BREAKING THE FAST
(Discusses various methods of building up the body after a fast,
especially the milk diet.)
There remains the question of how to break the fast, and this is the
most important part of the problem. You may undo all the good of your
fast by breaking it wrong, and you are a thousand times as apt to kill
yourself then, as while you are fasting. When your hunger comes back, it
comes back with a rush, and some people have not the will power to
control it.
I do not advocate a complete fast in any case except of serious chronic
disease, and then only under the advice of someone with experience; but
I advocate a short fast of a week or ten days for almost every common
ailment, and I know that such a fast will help, even where it may not
completely cure. You may go on fasting so long as you are quiet and
happy; but when you find you are becoming too weak for comfort, or for
the peace of mind of your family physician and your friends, you may
break your fast, and show them that it is possible to restore your
strength and body weight, and then they won't bother so much when you
try it again! Take nothing but liquid foods in the breaking of a fast; I
recommend the juices of fruits and tomatoes, also meat broths. If you
have fasted a week or two, take a quarter of a glass; if you have fasted
a month, take a tablespoonful, and wait and see what the results are.
Remember that your whole alimentary tract is out of action, and give it
a chance to start up slowly. Take small quantities of liquid food every
two hours for the first day. Then you can begin taking larger
quantities, and on the next day you can try some milk, or a soft poached
egg, or the pulp of cooked apples or prunes. Do not take any solid food
until you are quite sure you can digest it, and then take only a very
little. Do not take any starchy food until the third day.
I have known people to break these rules. I knew a man who broke his
fast on hamburg steak, and had to be helped out with a stomach pump.
Once I broke a week's fast with a plate of rich soup, because I was at a
friend's house and there was nothing else, and I yielded to the claims
of hospitality, and made myself ill and had to fast for several days
longer.
The easiest way to break a fast is upon a milk diet. I have seen
hundreds of people take this diet, and very few who did not get benefit.
The first time I fasted, which was twelve days, I lost 17 pounds, and I
took the milk diet for 24 days thereafter, and gained 32 pounds. I took
it at MacFadden's Sanitarium, where I had every attention. Since then, I
have many times tried to take a milk diet by myself, but have never been
able to get it to agree with me. I do not know how to explain this fact;
I state it, to show how hard it is to lay down general rules. On the
milk diet you take into your system two or three times as much food as
you can assimilate, and this is a violation of all my diet rules; but it
appears that the bacteria which thrive in milk produce lactic acid,
which is not harmful to the system, and if you do not take other foods
you may safely keep the system flooded with milk.
After a fast you should begin with small quantities of milk, and by the
third day you may be taking a full glass of warm milk every half hour or
every twenty minutes, until you have taken seven or eight quarts per
day. It is better to take it warm, but sometimes people take it just as
well without warming. Dr. Porter, who has a book on the milk diet,
insists upon complete rest, and makes his patients stay in bed.
MacFadden, on the other hand, recommends gymnastics in the morning
before the milk, and during the afternoon he recommends a rest from the
milk for a couple of hours, followed by abdominal exercises to keep the
bowels open. This is very important during a fast, because you are
taking great quantities of material into your system and it must not be
permitted to clog. Therefore take an enema daily, if necessary to a free
movement. Also take a warm bath daily. Take the juice of oranges and
lemons if you crave them.
Upon one thing everyone who has had experience with the milk diet
agrees, and that is the necessity of absolute mental rest. If you
become excited, or nervous, or angry on a milk diet, you may turn all
the contents of your stomach into hard curds, and may put yourself into
convulsions. The wonderful thing about the milk diet is the state of
physical and mental bliss it makes possible. It is the ideal way of
breaking a fast, because it leaves you no chance to get hungry; you have
all the food you want, and your system is bathed in happiness, a sense
of peace and well-being which is truly marvelous and not to be
described. You gain anywhere from half a pound to two pounds a day, and
you feel that you have never before in your life known what perfect
health could be. The fast sets you a new standard, you discover how
nature meant you to enjoy life, and never again are you content with
that kind of half existence with which you managed to worry along before
you discovered this remedy.
But let me hasten to add that I do not recommend the fast as a regular
habit of life. The fast is an emergency measure, to enable the body to
cleanse itself and to cure disease. When you have got your body clean
and free from disease, it is your business to keep it that way, and you
should apply your reason to the problem of how to live so that you will
not have to fast. If you find that you continue to have ailments, then
you must be eating wrongly, or overworking, or committing some other
offense against nature; either that, or else you must have some organic
trouble--a bone in your spine out of place, as the osteopaths tell you,
or your eyes out of focus, or your appendix twisted and infected. I do
not claim that the fasting cure will supplant the surgeons and the
oculists and the dentists. It will not mend your bones if you break
them, and it will not repair your teeth that are already decayed; but it
will help to keep your teeth from decaying in the future, and it will
help you to prepare for a surgical operation, and to recover from it
more quickly. I had to undergo an operation for rupture a couple of
years ago, and I fasted for two days before the operation, and for three
days after it, and I had no particle of nausea from the ether, and was
able to tend to my mail the day after the operation.
There is one disease for which I hesitate to recommend the fast, and
that is tuberculosis, because I have been told of cases in which the
patient lost weight and did not recover it. However, in my tabulation
of 277 cases, you will note four cases of tuberculosis, and in my book
is given a letter from a patient who claimed great benefit. If I had the
misfortune to contract tuberculosis, I would take a three or four day
fast, followed by a milk diet for a long period. The milk diet is
pleasant to take, and it cannot possibly do any harm. If it did not
effect a cure, I would try the Salisbury treatment--that is, lean meat
ground up and medium cooked, and nothing else, except an abundance of
hot water between meals. Prof. Irving Fisher wrote me that there is
urgent need of experiment to determine proper diet in tuberculosis; and
until these experiments have been made, we can only grope. I am quite
sure that the "stuffing system," ordinarily used by doctors, is a tragic
mistake.
In the case of any other disease whatever, even though I might take
medical or surgical treatment, I would supplement this by a fast,
because there is no kind of treatment which does not succeed better with
the blood in good condition. In the case of emergencies, accidents,
wounds, etc., I would rest assured that recovery would be more prompt if
I were fasting. When David Graham Phillips was shot, I wrote a letter to
the New York Call, saying that his doctors had killed him, because they
had fed him while he was lying in a critical condition in the hospital.
To take nutriment into the body under such circumstances is the greatest
of blunders.
The fast will help children, just as it helps adults, only they do not
need to fast so long. It will help the aged and make them feel young.
(You need not be afraid to fast, no matter how old you are.) It is, of
course, an immediate cure for fatness, and strange as it may seem, it is
also a cure for unnatural thinness. People with ravenous appetites are
just as apt to be thin as to be fat, because it is not what you eat that
builds up your body, but only what you assimilate, and if you eat too
much, you can make it impossible to assimilate anything properly. If you
take a fast and break it carefully, your body will come to its normal
weight, and all your functions to their normal activity.
A physician wrote me, taking me to task for listing among the cures
reported in my tabulation a case of locomotor ataxia. This disease, he
explained, is caused because a portion of a nerve has been entirely
destroyed, and it is a disease that is absolutely and positively and
forever incurable. I answered that I knew this to be the teaching of
present day medical science, but I invited him to consider for a moment
what happens in nature. When a crab loses a claw, we do not take it as a
matter of course that the crab must go about with one claw for the
balance of its life; nature will make that crab another claw. Man has
lost the power of replacing a lost leg, but he stills retains the power
of replacing tissue which has been cut away by a surgeon's knife, and
medical science takes this as a matter of course. How shall anybody say
that nature has forever lost the power of rebuilding a bit of nervous
tissue? How shall anyone say that if the blood-stream is cleansed of
poisons, and the energy of the whole body restored, one of the results
may not be the repairing of a broken nerve connection? I invite my
readers who have ailments, and especially I invite all medical men among
my readers, to make a fair test of the fasting cure. The results will
surprise them, and they will quickly be forced to revise their methods
of treating illness.
XXVII
DISEASES AND CURES
(Discusses some of the commoner human ailments, and what is known
about their cause and cure.)
I begin with the commonest of all troubles, known as a "cold." This name
implies that the cause of the trouble lies in exposure or chill. All the
grandmothers of the world are agreed about this. They have a phrase--or
at least they had it when I was a boy: "You will catch your death."
Every time I went out in the rain, every time I played with wet feet, or
sat in a draft, or got under a cold shower, I would hear the formula,
"You will catch your death."
And, on the other hand, there are the "health cranks," who declare
vehemently that the name "cold" is a misnomer and a trap for people's
thoughts. Cold has nothing to do with it, they say, and point to arctic
explorers who frequently get frozen to death, but do not "catch cold"
until they get back into the warm rooms of civilization. As for drafts,
the "health cranks" aver that a draft is merely "fresh air moving";
which is supposed to settle the matter. However, when you come to think
about it, you realize that a cyclone is likewise merely "fresh air
moving," so you have not decided the question by a phrase.
While I was writing these chapters on health I contracted a severe
cold--which was a joke on me. The history of this cold is as clear in my
mind as anything human can be, and it will serve for an illustration,
showing how much truth the grandmothers have on their side, and how much
the "health cranks" have.
To begin with, I had been overworking. All sorts of appeals come to me;
hundreds of people write me letters, and I cannot bear to leave them
unanswered. I accepted calls to speak, and invitations where I had to
eat a lot of stuff of which my reason disapproves; so one morning I woke
up with a slight sore throat. I fasted all day, and by evening felt all
right. But there came another call, and I consented to take a long
automobile ride on a cold and rainy night, and when I got back home,
after five or six hours, I was thoroughly chilled, and my "cold" came on
during the night.
This explanation will, I imagine, be satisfactory to all the
grandmothers of the world. All the dear, good grandmothers know that an
automobile ride on a cold, rainy night is enough to give any man "his
death." But listen, grandmothers! I have lain out watching for deer all
night in the late fall, with only a thin blanket to cover me, and gotten
up so stiff with cold that I could hardly move; yet I did not "catch
cold." When I was a youth, I have ridden a bicycle twenty miles to the
beach in April, with snow on the ground, and plunged into the surf and
swam, and then ridden home again. I have bathed in the sea when I had to
run a quarter of a mile in a bathing suit along a frost-covered pier,
and with an icy wind blowing through my bones; yet I never took cold
from that, and never got anything but a feeling of exhilaration. So it
must be that there is some reason why exposure causes colds at one time
and not at another.
The explanation takes you over to the "health cranks." They understand
that your blood-stream must be clogged, your bodily tone reduced by bad
air and lack of exercise, and more especially by over-eating, or by an
improperly balanced diet. But then most of them go to extremes, and
insist that the automobile ride and the chilled condition of my body had
nothing to do with my cold. But I know otherwise--I have watched the
thing happen so often. In times when I was run down, the slightest
exposure would cause me a cold, literally in a few minutes. I have got
myself a sore throat going out to the wood-pile on a winter day with
nothing on my head. I have got a cold by sitting still with wet feet, or
by sitting in a draft on a warm summer day, when I had been perspiring a
little. How to explain this I am not sure, but my guess is that you
drive the blood away from the surface of the body at a time when it is
weakened and exposed to infection, and you drive away the army of the
white corpuscles, and give the battlefield of your body to the germs.
I know there are nature curists who argue that germs have nothing to do
with disease; but they have never been able to convince me--germs are
too real, and too many, and too easy to watch. If you leave a piece of
meat exposed to the air in warm temperature, the germs in the air will
settle upon it and begin to feed upon it and to multiply; the meat,
being dead, is powerless to protect itself. But your nose and throat are
also meat, and just as good food for the germs. The only difference is
that this meat is alive, there is a living blood-stream circulating
through it, and several score billions of the body's own kind of germs,
the blood corpuscles. If these blood corpuscles are sound and properly
nourished, and are brought to the place of infection, they are able to
destroy all the common germs; so it is that you do not have diseases,
but instead have health. But your health always implies a struggle of
your organism against other organisms, and it is the business of your
reason to watch your body and give all the help you can in protecting
it. Coughs and colds, sore throats and headaches, are the first warnings
that your defenses are being weakened. As a rule these ailments are not
serious in themselves, but they are signs of a wrong condition, and if
you neglect this condition, pretty soon you will find that you have to
deal with something deadly.
My cure for a cold is to take an enema and a laxative, eat nothing for
twenty-four hours, and drink plenty of water. If you have a severe cold
or sore throat, you will be wise to lie in bed for a day or two, by an
open window. You may also use sprays and gargles if you wish, but you
will find them of little use, because the germs are deep in your mucous
membranes, and cannot all be reached from the outside. In the old sad
days of my ignorance I would get a cold, and go to the doctor, and have
my throat and nose pumped full of black and green and yellow and purple
liquids, which did me absolutely no good whatever; the cold would stay
on for two or three weeks, sometimes for eight or ten weeks, and I would
be miserable, utterly desperate. I was dying by inches, and not one of
the doctors could tell me why.
The next most common ailment is a headache, and this means poisons in
your blood-stream. It may be from improper diet, from alcohol, or drugs,
or bad air, or nervous excitement. If it is none of these things, then
you should begin to look for some organic difficulty, eye-strain, for
example, or perhaps defects in the spine. The osteopaths and the
chiropractors specialize on the spine, and have made important
discoveries. Their doctrine is, in brief, that the nervous force which
directs the blood-stream is carried to the organs of the body by nerves
which leave the spinal cord through openings between the vertebrae. If
any of these openings are pinched, you have a diminished nerve supply,
which means ill-health in that part of the body to which the nerve
leads. That such trouble can be corrected by straightening the bones of
the spine, seems perfectly reasonable; but like most people with a new
idea, the discoverers proceed to carry it to absurd extremes. I have
before me an official chiropractic pamphlet which states that vertebral
displacement is "the physical and perpetuating cause of ninety-five per
cent of all cases of disease; the remaining five per cent being due to
subluxations of other skeletal segments." Naturally people who believe
this will devote nearly all their study to the bones and the nervous
system. But surely, there are other parts of your body which are
necessary besides bones and nerves! And what if some of these parts
happen to be malformed or defective? What if your eyes do not focus
properly, and you are continually wearing out the optic nerve, thus
giving yourself headaches and neurasthenia? What if you have an appendix
that has been twisted and malformed from birth, and is a center of
infection so long as it remains in the body?
Several years ago I had an experience with the appendix, from which I
learned something about one of the commonest of human ailments,
constipation, or sluggishness of the bowels. This is a cause of
innumerable chronic ailments grouped under the head of auto-intoxication,
or the poisoning of the body by the absorption into the system of the
products of fermentation and decay in the bowels. The bowels should move
freely two or three times every day, and the movements should be soft. I
suffered from constipation for some twenty years, and tried, I think,
every remedy known both to science and to crankdom. In the beginning the
doctors gave me drugs which by irritating the intestinal walls cause
them to pour out quantities of water, and hurry the irritating
substances down the intestinal tract. That is all right for an
emergency; if you have swallowed a poison, or food which is spoiled, or
if you have overeaten and are ill, get your system cleaned out by any
and every device. But if you habitually swallow mild poisons, which is
what all laxatives are, you weaken the intestinal tract, and you have to
take more and more of these poisons, and you get less results. We may
set down as positive the statement that drugs are not a remedy for
constipation.
Next comes diet. Eat the rough and bulky foods, say the nature curists,
and stimulate the intestinal walls to activity. I tried that. I listened
to the extreme enthusiasts, and boiled whole wheat and ate it, and
consumed quantities of bran biscuit, and of a Japanese seaweed which Dr.
Kellogg prepares, and of petroleum oil, and even the skins of oranges,
which are most uncomfortable eating, I assure you. I would eat things
like this until I got myself a case of diarrhea--and so was cured of
constipation for a time! Strange as it may seem to you, there are even
people who tell you to eat sand. I listened to them, and ate many
quarts.
Then there is exercise. MacFadden taught me a whole series of exercises
for developing the muscles of the abdominal walls and the back, which
are greatly neglected by civilized man. The fundamental cause of
constipation is a sluggish life, and to exercise our bodies is a duty;
but to me it was always an agony of boredom to lie on a bed and wiggle
my abdomen for a quarter of an hour. The same thing applies to hot water
treatments, which are effective, but a nuisance and a waste of time. I
never could keep them up except when I was in trouble.
Three or four years ago I began to notice a continual irritating pain in
my right side, which I quickly realized must lie in the appendix. I
tried massage, and hot and cold water treatments, and my favorite
remedy, a week's fast. The pain disappeared, but it returned, so finally
I decided, to the dismay of my physical culture friends, to have the
appendix out. For years I had been reading the statements of nature
curists, that the appendix is an important and vital part of the body,
which pours an oil or something into the intestinal tract, and so helps
to prevent constipation. Well, evidently my appendix wasn't doing its
job, so I took it to a good surgeon. What I found was that it had been
twisted and malformed from birth, so that it was a center of continuous
infection. From the time I had that operation, I have never had to think
about the subject of constipation. This experience suggests to me how
easy it is for people to make statements about health which have no
relationship to facts.
I do not recommend promiscuous surgery, and I perfectly well realize
that if human beings would take proper care of their health, the great
proportion of surgical operations would be unnecessary. I realize,
also, that surgeons get paid by the job, and therefore have a money
interest in operating, and it is perfectly futile to expect that none of
them will ever be influenced by the profit motive. Nevertheless, it is
true that sometimes surgical operations are necessary, and that by
standing a little temporary inconvenience you can save yourself a
life-time of discomfort.
Take, for example, rupture. The human body has here a natural weakness,
from which there results a dangerous and uncomfortable affliction.
Hundreds of thousands of men are going around all their lives wearing
elaborate and expensive trusses which are almost, if not entirely
useless, and trying advertised "cures" which are entirely fakes. An
operation takes an hour or two, and two or three weeks in bed, and when
our government drafted its young men into the army and found that
fourteen in every thousand of them had rupture, it shipped them into the
hospitals wholesale and sewed them up. It happens that rupture affords
one case where scar tissue is stronger than natural tissue, and there
were practically no returns from the great number of army cases.
Likewise you find extreme statements repeated concerning the evils of
vaccination; but if you will read Parkman's "History of the Jesuits in
North America," you will see the horrible conditions under which the
Indians lived in the United States--noble savages, you understand,
entirely uncontaminated by civilized white men, and whole populations
regularly wiped out every few years by epidemics of smallpox. That these
epidemics ceased was due to the discovery that by infecting the body
with a mild form of the disease, it could be made to develop substances
which render it immune to the deadly form. Here in California we have a
law which makes vaccination for school children optional, and so we may
some day have another epidemic to test the theories of the
anti-vaccinationists.
I know, of course, the dreadful stories of people who have been given
syphilis and other diseases by impure vaccines. I don't know whether
such stories are true; but I do know that people who live in houses are
sometimes killed by earthquakes and by lightning, yet we do not cease to
live in houses because of this chance. It seems to me that the remedy
for such vaccination evils is not to abolish vaccination, but to take
more care in the manufacture of our vaccines.
This danger is removed by using vaccines which are sterile, and are made
especially for each person. Germs are taken from the sick person, and
injected into an animal. The body of the animal develops with great
rapidity the "anti-bodies" necessary to resistance to the germs; and as
these "anti-bodies" are chemical products, not affected by heat, we can
take a serum from the animal, sterilize it, and then inject it into the
system of the patient, thus increasing resistance to the disease. I
admit that the best way to increase such resistance is to take care of
your health; but sometimes we confront an emergency, and must use
emergency remedies. We have serums that really cure diphtheria and
meningitis, and one that will prevent lock-jaw; anyone who has ever seen
with his own eyes how the deadly membranes of diphtheria melt away as a
result of an injection, will be less dogmatic about the efforts of
science to combat disease.
Of course it is much pleasanter if you can destroy the source of the
disease, and keep it from getting into the human body. Every few years
the southern part of our country used to be devastated by yellow fever
epidemics. Every kind of weird and fantastic remedy was tried; people
would go around with sponges full of vinegar hung under their noses;
they would burn the clothing and bedding of those who died of the
disease; they would wear gloves when they went shopping, so as not to
touch the money with their hands. But at last medical experimenters
traced the disease to a certain kind of mosquito, and now, if we drain
the swamps and screen our houses and stay in doors after sundown, we do
not get yellow fever, nor malaria either. In the same way, if we keep
our bodies clean with soap and hot water, we do not get bitten by lice,
and so do not die of typhus. If we take pains with our drains and water
supply, so that human excrement does not get into it, and if we destroy
the filth-carrying housefly, we do not have epidemics of typhoid.
But under conditions of battle it is not possible for men to take these
precautions, and so when they go into the army they get a dose of
typhoid serum. And this illustrates the difference between a true or
hygienic remedy for disease, and a temporary or emergency remedy. If you
say that you want to abolish war, and with it the need for typhoid
vaccination, I cheerfully agree with you in this. All that I am trying
to do is to point out the folly of flying to extremes, and rejecting any
remedy which may help. What is the use of making the flat statement that
vaccinations and serums never aid in the cure of disease, when any man
can see with his own eyes the proof that they do? In the Spanish war,
before typhoid vaccination, many times more soldiers died of this
disease than died of bullets; but in the late war there was practically
no typhoid at all in the army camps. On the other hand, it was noticed
that the men who had just come in, and who therefore had just been
vaccinated, were considerably more susceptible to influenza; which shows
that vaccination does reduce the body condition for a time. The reader
may say that in this case I am trying to sit on both sides of the fence;
but the truth is that I am trying to keep an open mind, and to consider
all the facts, and to avoid making rash statements.
One of the statements you hear most frequently is that drugs can never
remedy disease, or help in remedying it. Now, I abhor the drugging
system of the orthodox medical men; I have talked with them, and heard
them talk with one another, and I know that they will mix up half a
dozen different substances, in the vague hope that some one of them will
have some effect. Even when they know definitely the effects they are
producing, they are in many cases merely suppressing symptoms. On the
other hand, however, it is a fact that medical science has had for a
generation or two a specific which destroys the germs of one disease in
the blood, without at the same time injuring the blood itself. That
disease is malaria, and the drug is quinine. Of course, the way to avoid
malaria is to drain the swamps; but you cannot do that all at once, nor
can you always screen your house and stay in at sundown. When you first
go into a country, you have no house to screen, and some emergency will
certainly arise that exposes you to mosquito bites. So you will need
quinine, and will be foolish not to use it, and know how to use it.
Recently medical chemists discovered another remedy, this time for
syphilis. It is called salvarsan, and while it does not always cure, it
frequently does. In laboratories today men are working over the problem
of constructing a combination of molecules which will destroy the germ
of sleeping sickness, without at the same time injuring the blood. If
they find it, they will save hundreds of millions of lives. I do not see
why we cannot recognize such a possibility, while at the same time
making use of physical culture, of diet and fasting.
When the manuscript of this book was sent to the printer, there appeared
in this place a paragraph telling of the work of Dr. Albert Abrams of
San Francisco, in the diagnosis and cure of disease by means of
radio-active vibrations. As the book is going to press, the writer finds
himself in San Francisco, attending Dr. Abrams' clinics; and so he finds
it possible to give a more extended account of some fascinating
discoveries, which seem destined to revolutionize medical science. If I
were to tell all that I have seen with my own eyes in the last twelve
days, I fear the reader would find his powers of credulity
overstretched, so I shall content myself with trying to tell, in very
sober and cautious language, the theory upon which Abrams is working,
and the technic which he has evolved.
Modern science has demonstrated that all matter is simply the activity
of electrons, minute particles of electric force. This is a statement
which no present-day physicist would dispute. The best evidence appears
to indicate that a molecule of matter is a minute reproduction of the
universe, a system of electrons whirling about a central nucleus. No eye
has ever beheld an electron, for it is billions of times smaller than
anything the microscope makes visible; but we can see the effects of
electronic activity, and all modern books of physics give photographs of
such. It is possible to determine the vibration rates of electrons, and
to Dr. Abrams occurred the idea of determining the vibration rates of
diseased tissue and disease germs. He discovered that it was invariably
the same; not merely does all cancerous material, for example, yield the
same rate, but the blood of a person suffering from cancer yields that
rate, at all times and under all circumstances. The vibration of cancer,
of tuberculosis, of syphilis--each is different, uniform and invariable.
Likewise in the blood are other vibrations, uniform and dependable,
which reveal the sex and age of the patient, the virulence of the
disease and the period of its duration--yes, and even the location in
the body, if there be some definite infected area. So here is a modern
miracle, an infallible device for the diagnosis of disease. Dr. Abrams
does not have to see the patient; all he has to have is a drop of blood
on a piece of white blotting paper, and he sits in his laboratory and
tells all about it, and somewhere several thousand miles away--in
Toronto or Boston or New Orleans--a surgeon operates and finds what he
has been told is there!
And that is only the beginning of the wonder; because, says Abrams, if
you know the vibration rate of the electrons of germs, you can destroy
those germs. It used to be a favorite trick of Caruso to tap a glass and
determine its musical note, and then sing that note at the glass and
shatter it to bits. It is well known that horses, trotting swiftly on a
bridge, have sometimes coincided in their step with the vibration of the
bridge and thus have broken it down. On that same principle this wizard
of the electron introduces into your body radio-activity of a certain
rate--and shall I say that he cures cancer and syphilis and tuberculosis
of many years standing in a few treatments? I will not say that, because
you would not and could not believe me. I will content myself with
telling what my wife and I have been watching, twice a day for the past
twelve days.
The scene is a laboratory, with rows of raised seats at one side for the
physicians who attend the clinic. There is a table, with the instruments
of measurement, and Dr. Abrams sits beside it, and before him stands a
young man stripped to the waist. The doctor is tapping upon the abdomen
of this man, and listening to the sounds. You will find this the
weirdest part of the whole procedure, for you will naturally assume that
this young man is being examined, and will be dazed when some one
explains that the patient is in Toronto or Boston or New Orleans, and
that this young man's body is the instrument which the doctor uses in
the determining of the vibration rates of the patient's blood. Dr.
Abrams tried numerous instruments, but has been able to find nothing so
sensitive to electronic activity as a human body. He explains to his
classes that the spinal cord is composed of millions of nerve fibres of
different vibration rates; hence a certain rate communicated to the
body, is automatically sorted out, and appears on a certain precise spot
of the body in the form of increased activity, increased blood pressure
in the cells, and hence what all physicians know as a "dull area," which
can be discovered by what is known as "percussion," a tapping with a
finger. To map out these areas is merely a matter of long and patient
experiment; and Abrams has been studying this subject for some twenty
years--he is author of a text-book on what is known as the "reactions
of Abrams." So now he provides the world with a series of maps of the
human body; and he sits in front of his "subject," and his assistant
places a specimen of blood in a little electrically connected box, and
sets the rheostat at some vibration number--say fifty--and Dr. Abrams
taps on a certain square inch of the abdomen of his "subject," and
announces the dread word "cancer." Then he places the electrode on
another part of the "subject's" body, and taps some more, and announces
that it is cancer of the small intestine, left side; some more tapping,
and he announces that its intensity is twelve ohms, which is severe; and
pretty soon there is speeding a telegram to the physician who has sent
this blood specimen, telling him these facts, and prescribing a certain
vibration rate upon the "oscilloclast," the instrument of radio-activity
which Dr. Abrams has devised.
Now, you watch this thing for an hour or two, and you say to yourself:
"Here is either the greatest magician in the history of mankind, or else
the greatest maniac." You may have come prepared for some kind of fraud,
but you soon dismiss that, for you realize that this man is desperately
in earnest about what he is doing, and so are all the physicians who
watch him. So you seek refuge in the thought that he must be deluding
himself and them, perhaps unconsciously. But you talk with these men,
and discover that they have come from all over the country, and always
for one reason--they had sent blood specimens to Abrams, and had found
that he never made a mistake; he told them more from a few drops of the
patient's blood than they themselves had been able to find out from the
whole patient. And then into the clinic come the doctor's own
patients--I must have heard sixty or eighty of them tell their story and
many of them have been lifted from the grave. People ten years blind
from syphilis who can see; people operated on several times for cancer
and given up for dying; people with tumors on the brain, or with one
lung gone from tuberculosis. It is literally a fact that when you have
sat in Abrams' clinic for a week, all disease loses its terrors.
This, you see, is really the mastery of life. If we can measure and
control the minute universe of the electron and the atom, we have
touched the ultimate source of our bodily life. I might take chapters of
this book to tell you of the strange experiments I have seen in this
clinic--showing you, for instance, how these vibrations respond to
thought, how by denying to himself the disease the patient can for a
few moments cancel in his body the activity of the harmful germs;
showing how the reactions differ in the different sexes and at different
ages, and how they respond to different colors and different drugs.
Abrams' method has revealed the secret of such efficacy as drugs
possess--their work is done by their radio-activity, and not by their
chemical properties. Also the problem of vaccination has been
solved--for Abrams has discovered a dread new disease, which is bovine
syphilis, originally caused in cattle by human inoculation, and now
reintroduced in the human being by vaccination, and becoming the agent
which prepares the soil of the body for such disorders as tuberculosis
and cancer. And it appears that we can all be rendered immune to these
diseases, by a few electronic vibrations, introduced into our bodies in
childhood; so is opened up to our eyes a wonderful vision of a new race,
purified and made fit for life. So here at last is science justified of
her optimism, and our faith in human destiny forever vindicated. Take my
advice, whoever you may be that are suffering, and find out about this
new work and help to make it known to the world.
There are many romances of medical science, some of them fascinating as
murder mysteries and big game hunting. Turn to McMasters' "History of
the People of the United States" and read his account of the terrible
epidemic of yellow fever in Philadelphia a hundred years ago; I have
already referred to the weird and incredible things the people did in
their effort to ward off this plague--sponges of vinegar under their
noses and "fever fires" burning in the streets; and then a mosquito
would fly up and bite them, and in a few hours they would be dead! Or
what could be stranger than the tracing of the bubonic plague, which has
cost literally billions of human lives, to a parasite in the blood of
fleas which live on the bodies of rats! Or what could be more unexpected
than the tracing of our rheumatic aches and twinges to the root canals
of the teeth!
One of the common ailments which afflict poor humanity is rheumatism, a
cause of endless suffering. It was supposed to be due to damp climate
and exposure, and this is true to a certain extent, in the same way that
colds are due to exposure. But the investigators realized that there
must be some bodily condition rendering one susceptible, and they set to
work to trace this condition down. The pains of rheumatism are caused by
uric acid settling in the joints of the body. What causes the uric
acid? Well, there is uric acid in red meat, so let us forbid rheumatic
people to eat it! But this is overlooking the fact that the human body
itself is a uric acid factory; and also the fact that uric acid taken
into the stomach may not remain uric acid by the time it gets to the
blood-stream. We know that you may eat a great deal of fruit acid
without necessarily making acid blood. On the other hand, you can make
acid blood by eating a lot of sugar! So you see it isn't as simple as it
sounds.
Rheumatism has been traced to its lair, which is found to be the roots
of the teeth. Here is a part of the body difficult to get at, and as a
consequence of bad diet and unwholesome ways of living, infections will
start there, and pus sacs be formed, and the poisons absorbed into the
blood-stream and distributed through the body. The first thought is to
draw the infected teeth; but that is a serious matter, because you need
your teeth to chew your food. So the dentist has to go through a
complicated process of opening up the tooth and cleaning out the root
canals, and treating the infected spots at the roots. Then he has to
fill the tooth all the way down to the roots, leaving no place for
infection to gather. This, of course, takes time and costs money, and is
one more illustration of the fact that there is one health law for the
rich and another health law for the poor.
All the time that I write these chapters about health I feel guilty. I
know that the wholesome food I recommend costs money, and I know that
surgery and dentistry cost money--yes, even sunlight and fresh air and
recreation; even a fast, because you have to rest while you take it, and
you have to have a roof over your head, and warmth in winter time, and
somebody to wait upon you when you are weak. I know that for a great
many of the people who read what I write, all these things are
impossible of attainment; I know that for the great majority of the
common people the benefits of science do not exist. Science discovers
how to prevent disease, but the discoveries are not applied, because the
profit system controls the world, and the profit system wants the labor
of the poor, regardless of what happens to their health. If the people
fall ill, they are thrown upon the scrap heap, and the profit system
finds others to take their place.
Take, for example, tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is a germ infection, but
it practically never gets hold upon a human body except when the body is
reduced by undernourishment and lack of fresh air. Tuberculosis,
therefore, is a disease of slums and jails. It is definitely and
indisputably a disease of poverty. It could be wiped off the face of the
earth in a single generation; and the same is true of typhus and
typhoid. There is another whole host of ailments which could be wiped
out by measures of public hygiene, plus education. This includes all the
infant diseases, and the deadly venereal diseases. But the profit system
stands in the way; and so, in these closing paragraphs of this Book of
the Body, I say that there is one disease which is the deadliest of all,
and the source of all others, and that disease is poverty.
I know a certain physician to the rich, who is an honest and
conscientious man. He said, "I loath my work. I am wasting my time. I am
called in by these fat, over-fed rich people in their leisure class
hotels, and what am I to say to them? Shall I say to them, 'You are
living an abnormal life, and you can never be well until you cut out
root and branch all your habits of self indulgence which are destroying
you?' But no, I can't say that--not one time in a thousand. I am
expected to be polite and serious, and to listen to them while they tell
the long tiresome story of their symptoms, and I have to encourage them,
and give them some temporary device that will remove some of the
symptoms of their trouble."
And what should one say to this honest physician? Should one tell him to
go and be a physician to the poor? Would he be any happier there? He
could tell the poor the causes of their diseases, and they would listen
patiently--they are trained to listen, and to accept what they are told.
Here is a girl living in an inside bedroom in a tenement, and working
ten or eleven hours a day in an unventilated factory, and she is ill
with tuberculosis. The physician tells her that she needs plenty of
fresh air and rest, and a lot of eggs and milk in her diet. He tells her
that, and he knows that she has as much chance of carrying out his
orders as of flying to the moon. Or maybe he comes upon a typhoid
epidemic, and discovers, as happened to a friend of mine in Chicago,
that there is defective plumbing in some houses owned by the political
leader of the district. Or maybe it is a case of venereal disease, in a
young man who was drafted into the army and turned loose amid the joys
of Paris. Maybe it is just a commonplace, every-day story of a room full
of school children, 22 per cent of them undernourished, as is the case
in New York City, and the parents out of work a part of the time, and
with no possibility in their lives of ever earning enough to feed the
children properly. When you confront these universal facts of our
present social order, you realize that the problem of disease is not
merely a problem of the body, but is a problem of the mind as well; a
problem of politics and religion and philosophy, of the whole way of
thinking of the so-called civilized world. A book of health which did
not point out these facts would be, not a book of health, but a book of
sham.
But meantime, while we are trying to change the world's ideas, we have
to live, and we can do our work better if we keep as well as possible. I
have tried to point out the way; it is, as you can see, a matter in part
of the body and in part of the mind. All the bodily regime here laid out
has its basis in mental habits; all wise and wholesome ways of life can,
at the age when our minds are plastic, be made into "second
nature"--things which we do automatically, without effort or temptation
to do otherwise. This is the real secret of true happiness in the
conduct of our personal lives; to acquire self-control, to rule our
desires and our passions, not harshly and spasmodically, but serenely,
as one drives a car which he thoroughly understands. It is in vain that
we preach freedom to men who have not this self-mastery; as the poet
tell us: "The sensual and the dark rebel in vain, slaves of their own
compulsion." And of all the personal possessions which man can attain on
this earth, the most precious is the one of a sound mind controlling a
sound body. I close this book by quoting some verses written by Sir
Henry Wotton three hundred years ago, which I have all my life
considered one of the noblest pieces of poetry in our heritage:
THE CHARACTER OF A HAPPY LIFE
How happy is he born and taught
That serveth not another's will;
Whose armour is his honest thought
And simple truth his utmost skill!
Whose passions not his masters are,
Whose soul is still prepared for death,
Not tied unto the world with care
Of public fame, or private breath.
Who envies none that chance doth raise
Or vice; who never understood
How deepest wounds are given by praise;
Nor rules of state, but rules of good:
Who hath his life from rumours freed,
Whose conscience is his strong retreat;
Whose state can neither flatterers feed,
Nor ruin make accusers great:
Who God doth late and early pray
More of His grace than gifts to lend;
And entertains the harmless day
With a well-chosen book or friend;
--This man is freed from servile bands
Of hope to rise, or fear to fall;
Lord of himself, though not of lands;
And having nothing, yet hath all.
INDEX
Abrams, Dr., 190
Adultery, 33
Adventist, 99
Agriculture, 25
Alcohol, 151
Anti-bodies, 188
Antinomies, 58
Appendix, 186
Arnold, 42
Arrhenius, 101
Automatic writing, 67
Bairnsfather, 29
Bathing, 162
Battle Creek Sanitarium, 118
Beauchamp, 70, 85, 89
Beethoven, 47
Bergson, 17
Beri-beri, 128
Bible, 77
Bio-chemist, 59
Black bread, 128
Blood, 106
Body, 53, 105
Booth, 58
Bourne, 69
Bruce, 71
Bury, 15
Caffein, 150
Calories, 135
Candy, 137
Capitalist, 100
Carbohydrates, 124
Carbon monoxide, 157
Children, 140, 180
Chiropractors, 174, 184
Chittenden, 136
Christian Scientists, 5, 65, 105
Clothing, 160
Coffee, 151
Colds, 183
Commandments, 32
Communist, 99
Complete fast, 172
Comstock, 25
Conduct, 42
Consciousness, 56
Constipation, 185
Cooking, 129, 142
Crawford, 88
Cyrus, 164
Dandruff, 109
Dante, 77
Darwin, 17, 46
Dentistry, 126, 190
Determinists, 57
Diet, 131
Diet Standards, 135
Digestion, 145
Diphtheria, 188
Diseases, 107, 117
Dogs, 17
Draft, 182
Drugs, 118, 150, 185, 189
Dubb, 63
Duncan, 102
Dyspepsia, 117
Eddy, 65
Edison, 45, 86
Einstein, 101
Elberfeld horses, 68
Evolution, 8, 17
Exercise, 163
Faith, 9
Faith curists, 65
Fast cure, 171
Fatness, 139
Fats, 124
Fever, 108
Fireless cooker, 142
Fireplace, 157
Fisher, 136
Fletcher, 119, 145
Food filter, 145
Fourth dimension, 5
Free thinker, 15
Freud, 71
Fruit fast, 175
Frugality, 38
Frying-pan, 129
Furnace, 157
Gargles, 184
Gastronomic art, 148
Genius, 49, 60
George, 18
Germs, 183
God, 22, 50
Goethe, 47
Golden rule, 51
Greens, 132
Gymnastic work, 166
Hair, 109
Hallucinations, 75
Hamlet, 48
Happiness, 9
Harrison, 6
Hats, 110
Headache, 122, 150, 184
Health cranks, 182
Heart, 108
Houdin, 93
Hugo, 48
Huxley, 17, 62
Hyslop, 82
Iceberg, 61
Infanticide, 28
Instincts, 134
Intelligence, 22
Immortality, 79
Irwin, Will, 86
James, 30, 59, 60
Jesus, 47, 48, 50, 51, 76
John Barleycorn, 152
Johnson, 58
Jonson, 44
Kant, Immanuel, 4, 47, 51, 58
Kellogg, Doctor, 118, 164, 186
Kilmer, Joyce, 44
Knowledge, 94
Kropotkin, 18, 26
Langley, 74
Lankester, Prof. E. Ray, 23
Laxatives, 175, 185
Leanness, 139
Leonardo, 47
Liebault, 64
Life, 3
Lily Dale, 86, 90
Lincoln, 47
Locomotor ataxia, 180
Lodge, Sir Oliver, 83
Lodge, Raymond, 87
London, Jack, 152
Macaulay, 39
MacDowell, Edward, 56
MacFadden, 178, 186
MacSwiney, 170
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 68
Malaria, 189
Malthusian law, 25
Marquesans, 113
Materializations, 88
Matter, 3
Meal-hour, 147
Measurement of Intelligence, Terman's, 95
Meat, 121
Medical science, 105
Mesmer, 63
Messina earthquake, 170
Metaphysics, 4
Metchnikoff, 138
Milk diet, 128
Moderation, 39
Monism, 3
Morality, 21, 31, 34, 50
Morgan, 45
Mormon, 99
Mozart, 68
Multiple personality, 69
Mutation, 17
Myers, 49
Nature, 21, 24, 29
Nature cure, 160
Nature Woman, 176
Neighbor, 50
Newcomb, Simon, 101
Newton, 47
New York Times, 169
Nicotine, 154
Nietzsche, 17
Novels, 164
Nutrition of Man, 136
Oil stoves, 158
Opsonins, 112
Optimism, 42
Osteopaths, 184
Ouija, 67
Overeating, 134
Oxygen, 156
Patrick, Dr., 167
Pavlov, 148
Phantasms, 75
Phillips, David Graham, 180
Piper, Mrs., 68
Play, 165
Poisons, 146
Pork, 142
Porter, Dr., 178
Positivists, 6
Poverty, 194
Prices of food, 141
Prince, Dr. Morton, 70, 89
Profits of Religion, 78, 99
Proteins, 123
Prunes, 127
Psychology, 96
Psychotherapy, 64
Puritans, 39
Quackenbos, 64
Quinine, 188
Quixote, 48
Raisins, 127
Raw food, 119
Read, Alfred Baker, 28
Reason, 13
Refined foods, 126
Relaxation, 167
Religion, 32
Reincarnation, 76
Rest, 146
Revelation, 12
Rheumatism, 193
Rice, 128
Rockefeller, 45
Roosevelt, Theodore, 25, 45
Rugs, 159
Rupture, 187
Sabbath, 99
Salisbury, 120
Sally, 70, 85
Salt, 143
Meats, salted, 143
Salts, 124
Salvarsan, 189
Savages, 135
Savage, Rev. Minot J., 74
Schrenck-Notzing, 88
Scurvy, 128
Seneca, 98
Shakespeare, 47
Shelley, 45, 48
Sleep, 162
Sleeping sickness, 113, 173
Smokers, 153
Socialism, 167
Sophocles, 87
Sore throat, 183
Spencer, 8
Spinoza, 79
Spirits, 82
Spiritualists, 86
Starch, 122, 124
Stealing, 33
Steam heat, 158
Stimulant, 149
Stock Exchange, 158
Stomach, 105, 138, 148
Style, 161
Subconscious mind, 61
Sunday code, 40
Sugar, 126
Surgery, 186
Survival, 81
Survival of the fittest, 22
Syndicalism, 15
Syphilis, 189
Tanner, Dr., 169
Tariff, 37
Tea, 151
Teeth, 127, 193
Telepathy, 67, 75
Theosophists, 76
Tight shoes, 161
Tobacco, 153
Tolstoi, 49
Tonsilitis, 107
Trance, 63
Tropism, 54
Tuberculosis, 112, 120, 179, 194, 195
Twain, Mark, 93
Typhoid, 112, 188, 192
Uranus, 92
Uric acid, 193
Vaccination, 187, 189
Vaccines, 188
Vegetarian, 121
Vitamines, 127, 142
Wallace, 46
Wells, H. G., 22
Williams, Dr. Henry Smith, 102
Worth, Patience, 84
Yellow fever, 188
Yogis, 90
THE BOOK OF LIFE
VOLUME TWO: LOVE AND SOCIETY
_To_
Kate Crane Gartz
in acknowledgment of her unceasing efforts for a
better world, and her fidelity to those
who struggle to achieve it.
CONTENTS
PART THREE: THE BOOK OF LOVE
PAGE