The Book of Life Part 12

But consider games and sports: men do not have to work their bodies, yet they go out and deliberately hunt for trouble! They invent themselves subtle and complicated games, and are not content until they find people who can beat them at it, or at any rate can make them work to the limit of their strength, until they are in a dripping perspiration and thoroughly exhausted! I may be too optimistic about "human nature," but I believe that this is the att.i.tude every normal human being takes toward the powers, both mental and physical, which he possesses; he wants to use them, and for all they are worth. If you don't believe it, just take any group of youngsters, give them a baseball and bat, turn them loose in a vacant lot, and watch them "choose up sides" and fall to work, screaming and shouting in wild excitement! There are some races of the earth which do not yet know baseball, but the Filipinos and the j.a.panese have learned it, and even the war-worn "Poilus" and the supercilious "Tommies" condescended to experiment with it. And if you think it is only physical compet.i.tion that young human animals enjoy, try them at putting on a play, or printing a magazine, or conducting a debate, or building a house--anything whatever that involves healthy compet.i.tion, and is related to the big things of life, but without being for the profit of some exploiter! Get clear the plain and simple distinction between work and play: play is what you want to do, while work is what the profit system makes you do!

CHAPTER XXV

THE FASTING CURE

(Deals with nature's own remedy for disease, and how to make use of it.)

We have next to consider the various human ailments, what causes them, and how they can be remedied. As it happens, I know of a cure that comes pretty near being that impossible thing, a "cure-all." At any rate, it is so far ahead of all other cures, that a discussion of it will cover three-fourths of the subject.

When I was a boy living in New York, there was a man by the name of Dr.

Tanner, who took a forty-day fast. He was on public exhibition at the time, and was supposed to be watched day and night; the newspapers gave a great deal of attention to the story, and crowds used to come to gaze at him. I remember very well the conversations I heard about the matter.

People were quite sure that it couldn't be true. The man must be getting something to eat on the sly; he must have some nourishment in the water he drank; no human being could fast more than five or six days without starving to death.

In the year 1910 I published in the United States and England a magazine article telling how on several occasions I had fasted ten or twelve days, and what I had accomplished by it. I found that I had the same difficulty to confront as old Dr. Tanner; I received scores of letters from people who called me a "faker," and I read scores of newspaper editorials to the same effect. The New York Times published a dispatch about three young ladies on Long Island who were trying a three-day fast, and the Times commented editorially to the effect that these young ladies were "the victims of a shallow and unscrupulous sensationalist."

The notion that human beings can perish for lack of food in a few days is deeply rooted in people's minds. Recently a group of eleven Irishmen in jail set to work to starve themselves to death, as a protest against British rule in their country. Day after day the newspapers reported the news from Cork prison, and at about the twentieth day they began to state that the prisoners were dying, that the priest had been sent for, that their relatives were gathered on the prison steps. Day after day such reports continued, through the thirties, and the forties, and the fifties, and the sixties, and the seventies. One man died on the eighty-eighth day, and MacSwiney died on the seventy-fourth. The other nine gave up after ninety-four days and were all restored to health. I watched carefully the newspaper and magazine comment on this incident, yet I did not see a single remark on the medical aspects of it; I could not discover that scientific men had learned anything whatever about the ability of the body to go without food for long periods.

Get this clear at the outset: n.o.body ever "starved to death" in less than two months, and it is possible for a fat person to go without food for as long as three or four months. People who "starve to death" in shorter times do not die of starvation, but of fright. The first time I fasted happened to be at the time of the Messina earthquake. I was walking about, perfectly serene and happy, having been without food for three days, and I read in my newspaper how the rescue s.h.i.+ps had reached Messina, and found the population ravenous, in the agonies of starvation, some of the people having been without food for seventy-two hours! (It sounds so much worse, you see, when you state it in hours.)

The second point to get clear is that the fast is a physiological process; that is to say, it is something which nature understands and carries through in her own serene and efficient way. When you take a fast, you are not carrying out a freak notion of your own, or of mine; you are discovering a lost instinct. Every cat and dog knows enough not to take food when it is ill; it is only in hospitals conducted by modern medical science that the custom prevails of serving elaborate "trays" to invalids. I remember a story about a man who made himself a reputation and a fortune by curing the pet dogs of the rich. These beautiful little creatures, which sleep between silken covers, and have several servants to wait upon them, and are fed from gold and silver dishes upon rich and elaborately cooked foods, fall victim to as many diseases as their mistresses, and they would be brought to this specialist, who conducted his dog hospital in an old brickyard. In each one of the compartments of the brick kiln he would shut up a dog with a supply of fresh water, a crust of stale bread, a piece of bacon rind, and the sole of an old shoe; and after a few days he would go back and find that the dog had eaten the crust of bread, and then he would write to the owner that the dog was on the high road to recovery. He would go back a few days later and find that the dog had eaten the piece of bacon rind, and then he would write that the dog was very nearly cured. He would wait until the dog had eaten the piece of shoe leather, and then he would write that the dog was completely cured, and the owner might come and take it away.

Just what is the process of the fast cure? I do not pretend to know positively. I can only make guesses, and wait for science to investigate. I believe that the main source of the diseases of civilized man is improper nutrition, and the clogging of the system with food poisons in various stages. And when you fast you do two things: first, you stop entirely the fresh supply of those food poisons, and second, you allow the whole of the body's digestive and a.s.similative tract to rest--to go to sleep, as it were--so that all the body's energy may go to other organs. The body carries with it at all times a surplus store of nutriment, which can be taken up and used by the blood stream, apparently with much less trouble than is required to convert fresh food to the body's uses. In other words, the body can feed on its own tissues more easily than it can feed from the stomach. In the fast you may lose anywhere from half a pound to two pounds in weight per day, and this will be taken, first from your store of fat, and then from your muscular tissues. Every part of your muscular tissue will be taken, before anything is taken from your vital organs, your nerves or your blood-stream. So long as there is a particle of muscular material left, so long as you can make even the slightest movement of one finger, you are still fasting, and it is only when your muscular tissue is all gone that you begin at last to starve. So far as I know, the cases of MacSwiney and the other Irishman are the only cases on record where fasters have died of starvation.

What the body does during the fast is quite plain, and can be told by many symptoms. It begins a thorough house-cleaning, throwing out poisonous material by every channel. The perspiration and the breath become offensive, the tongue becomes heavily coated, so that you can sc.r.a.pe the material off with a knife. I have heard vegetarians explain this by saying that when the body is living off its own tissues, it is following a cannibal diet; but that is all nonsense, because you can live on meat exclusively, and quickly satisfy yourself that none of these symptoms occurs. It is evident that the body is taking advantage of the opportunity to get rid of waste products; and this will go on for ten days, for twenty days, in some cases for as long as forty or fifty days; and then suddenly occurs a strange thing: in spite of the "cannibal diet" the symptoms all come to a sudden end. The tongue clears, the breath becomes sweet, the appet.i.te suddenly awakens.

During the period of a normal fast you lose all interest in food. You almost forget that there is such a thing as eating; you can look at food without any more desire for it than you have to swallow marbles and carpet tacks. But then suddenly appet.i.te returns, as I have explained, and you find that you can think of nothing but food. This is what students of the subject describe as a "complete fast," and while I do not want to go to extremes and say that the "complete fast" will cure every case of every disease, I can certainly say this: in the letters which have come to me from people who tried the fast at my suggestion, there are cases of every kind of common disease. In my book, "The Fasting Cure," I give the results in cases reported to me after the publication of my first magazine article. I quote two paragraphs:

"The total number of fasts taken was 277, and the average number of days was six. There were 90 of five days or over, 51 of ten days or over, and six of 30 days or over. Out of the 119 person who wrote to me, 100 reported benefit, and 17 no benefit. Of these 17 about half give wrong breaking of the fast as the reason for the failure. In cases where the cure had not proved permanent, about half mentioned that the recurrence of the trouble was caused by wrong eating, and about half of the rest made this quite evident by what they said. Also it is to be noted that in the cases of the 17 who got no benefit, nearly all were fasts of only three or four days.

"Following is the complete list of diseases benefited--45 of the cases having been diagnosed by physicians: indigestion (usually a.s.sociated with nervousness), 27; rheumatism, 5; colds, 8; tuberculosis, 4; constipation, 14; poor circulation, 3; headaches, 5; anaemia, 3; scrofula, 1; bronchial trouble, 5; syphilis, 1; liver trouble, 5; general debility, 5; chills and fever, 1; blood poisoning, 1; ulcerated leg, 1; neurasthenia, 6; locomotor ataxia, 1; sciatica, 1; asthma, 2; excess of uric acid, 1; epilepsy, 1; pleurisy, 1; impaction of bowels, 1; eczema, 2; catarrh, 6; appendicitis, 3; valvular disease of heart, 1; insomnia, 1; gas poisoning, 1; grippe, 1; cancer, 1."

There are many diseases with many causes, and some yield more quickly than others to the fast. In the first group I put the diseases of the digestive and alimentary tract. Stomach and bowel troubles, and the nervous disorders occasioned by these, stop almost immediately when you fast. Next come disorders of the blood-stream, which are generally a second stage of digestive troubles. Everything immediately due to impurities of the blood, pimples, boils, and ulcers, inflammation, badly healing wounds, etc., respond to a few days of fasting as to the magic touch of the old-time legends. When it comes to diseases caused by germ infections, you have a double aspect of the problem, and must have a double method of attack. I would not like to say that fasting could cure such a disease as sleeping sickness, to the germs of which our systems are not accustomed, and against which they may well be helpless. On the other hand, in the case of common infections, such as colds and sore throats, the fast is again the touch of magic. Having been plagued a great deal by these ailments in past times, I am accustomed to say that I would not trade my knowledge of fasting for everything else that I know about health.

The first thing you must do if you want to take a fast is to read the literature on the subject and make up your mind that the experiment will do you no injury. You should also try to get your relatives to make up their minds, because you are nervous when you are fasting, and cannot withstand the attacks of the people around you, who will go into a panic and throw you into a panic. As I said before, it is quite possible for people to die of panic, but I do not believe that anybody ever died of a fast. I have known of two or three cases of people dying while they were fasting, but I feel quite certain that the fast did not cause their death; they would have died anyhow. You must bear in mind that among the people who try the fast, a great many are in a desperate condition; some have been given up by the doctors, and if now and then one of these should die, we may surely say that they died in spite of the fast, and not because of it. There is no physician who can save every patient, and it would be absurd to expect this. I have read scores of letters from people who were at the point of death from such "fatal" diseases as Bright's disease, sclerosis of the liver, and fatty degeneration of the heart, and were literally s.n.a.t.c.hed out of the jaws of death by beginning a fast. I would not like to guess just what percentage of dying people in our hospitals might be saved if the doctors would withdraw all food from them, but I await with interest the time when medical science will have the intelligence to try that simple experiment and report the results.

Just the other day in the Los Angeles county jail, a chiropractor went on hunger strike, as a protest against imprisonment, and he fasted 41 days. Then he broke his fast, the reason being given that his pulse was down to 54, and he was afraid of dying. I smiled to myself. The normal pulse is 70. I have taken my pulse many times at the end of a ten-day fast, and it has been as low as 32, and I am not dead yet, and if I wait to die from the symptoms of a fast, I expect to live a long time indeed!

The first time I fasted, I felt very weak, and lay around and hardly cared to lift my head; if I walked from my bed to the lawn, I was tired in the legs. But since then I have grown used to fasting. I have fasted for a week probably twenty or thirty times, and on such occasions I have gone about my business as if nothing were happening. Of course I would not try to play tennis, or to climb a mountain, but it is a fact that on the seventh day of a fast in New York, I climbed the five or six flights of stairs to the top of the Metropolitan Opera House, and felt no ill effects from doing this. I climbed slowly, and was careful not to tire myself. The simple rule is not to have anything that you must do on the fast, and then do what you feel like doing. Lie down and rest, and read a book, and take as much exercise as you find you enjoy. Keep your mind quiet and free from worries, and lock out of the house everybody who tells you that your heart is going to stop beating in the next few minutes, and that you must have an injection of strychnine to start it, and some beefsteak and fried onions to "restore your strength." Give yourself up to the care of your wise old mother nature, who will attend to your heart just as securely and serenely as she attended to it in the days before you were born.

By fasting I mean that you take no food whatever. I know some nature cure teachers who practice what they call a "fruit fast." All I know is that if I eat nothing but fruit, I soon have my stomach boiling with fermentation, and also I suffer with hunger; whereas, if I take a complete fast, I promptly forget all about food. You must drink all the water you can on the fast. This helps nature with her house-cleaning; it is well to drink a gla.s.s of water every half hour at least. Do not try to go without water, and then write me that the fasting cure is a failure. Also please do not write and ask me if it will be fasting if you take just a little crackers and milk, or some soup, or something else that you think doesn't count!

I recommend a dose of laxative to clean out the system at the beginning of a fast, because the bowels are apt to become sluggish at once, and the quicker you get the system cleansed, the better. It does no good to take laxatives if you are going to pile in more food, but if you are going to fast, that is a different matter. You should take a full warm enema every day during the fast, so long as it brings any results. There are some people whose bowels are so frightfully clogged that I have known the enema to bring results even in the second and third weeks. On the other hand, if there is no solid matter to be removed, a small enema every day will suffice. Take a warm bath every day; and needless to say, you should get all the fresh air you can, and should sleep as much as you can. You may have difficulty in sleeping, because the fast is apt to make you nervous and wakeful. I have known people who could not fast because they could not sleep, and I have taught them a little trick, to put a hot water bottle at the feet, and another on the abdomen, to draw the blood away from the head. So they would quickly fall asleep, and they got great benefit from their fasts.

You should supply yourself with good music if you can, and with plenty of good reading matter. You will be amazed to find how active your mind becomes; perhaps you had never known before what a mind you had. Your blood has always been so clogged with food poisons that you didn't know you could think. My three act play, "The Nature Woman," was conceived and written in two days and a half on a fast; but I do not recommend this kind of thing--on the contrary, I strongly urge against it, because if you work your brain on a fast, you do not get the good from your fast, and do not recover so quickly. Put off all your problems until you have got your health back, and seek only to divert your mind while fasting.

CHAPTER XXVI

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 gla.s.s; 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 quant.i.ties of liquid food every two hours for the first day. Then you can begin taking larger quant.i.ties, 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 a.s.similate, 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 quant.i.ties of milk, and by the third day you may be taking a full gla.s.s 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 quant.i.ties 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 a.s.sured 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 circ.u.mstances 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 appet.i.tes 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 a.s.similate, and if you eat too much, you can make it impossible to a.s.similate 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."