Chapter 3: THE HUMORS OF FASTING: The Fasting Cure by Upton Sinclair from archive.org

THE HUMORS OF FASTING 

might have kept a sanatorium for 
those people who have begged me to let 
them come and live near me while they 
were taking a fast. One woman writes 
to ask me to name my own price to take 
charge of a case of elephantiasis which 
has been given up by all the experts in 
Europe ! 

Also, I could fill an article with the 
*' humors " of these letters. One 
woman writes a long and anxious in- 
quiry as to whether it is permissible to 
drink any water while fasting; and 
then follows this up with a special 
delivery letter to say that she hopes I 
will not think she is crazy — she had 
read the article again and noted the 
injunction to drink as much water as 
she can ! And then comes a letter 
from a man who wants to know if I 
really mean it all; do I truly expect 
him to eat nothing whatever — or would 

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THE FASTING CURE 

I call it fasting it he ate just nuts and 
fruit now and then? Quite recently 
I was talking with a physician — a suc- 
cessful and well-known physician — 
who refused point-blank to believe that 
a human being could live for more than 
four or five days without any sort of 
nutriment. There was no use talking 
about it — it was a physiological im- 
possibility; and even when I offered 
him the names and addresses of a hun- 
dred people who had done it, he went 
off unconvinced. And yet that same 
physician professes a religion which 
through nearly two thousand years has 
recommended " fasting arid prayer " 
as the method of the soul's achieve- 
ment; and he will go to church, and 
listen reverently to accounts of a forty- 
day fast in the wilderness ! And he 
lives in a country in which there are 
sanatoriums where hundreds of people 

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THE HUMORS OF FASTING 

are fasting all the time, and where 
twenty or thirty-day fasts occasion no 
more remark than a good golf -score at 
a summer hotel ! 

If you have any doubt that such 
fasts are taken, you can very quickly 
convince yourself. Less than a year 
ago I saw a man completing a fifty- 
day fast; I talked with him day by 
day, and I knew absolutely that it was 
all in good faith. The symptoms of 
fasting are as distinct and unmistak- 
able as are, for instance, those of small- 
pox; you could no more persuade an 
experienced person that you are fast- 
ing when you are not fasting, than you 
could persuade a bacteriologist that 
you had sleeping-sickness when you 
were merely lazy. 

When I was a very small boy, I re- 
call that a Dr. Tanner took a forty- 
day fast in a museum in New York; 

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THE FASTING CURB 

and I recollect well the conversation 
in our family — how obvious it was that 
the thing must be a fake, and how 
foolish people were to be taken in by 
so absurd a fake. *' He gets some- 
thing to eat when nobody's looking," 
we would say. 

But then what about his weight? 
Here is a man, going along day by day, 
year in and year out, weighing in the 
neighbourhood of a hundred and fifty 
pounds; and now, all of a sudden, he 
begins to lose a pound a day, as regu- 
larly as the sun rises. How does he 
doit? 

" Well," we would say, '* he must 
work hard and get rid of it." 

But how can a man do that, when he 
had no longer enough muscular tissue 
left to support his weight? And 
when his pulse is only thirty-five beats 
to the minute ? 



THE HUMORS OF FASTING 

Then, says the reader, perhaps he 
goes to a Turkish bath, and sweats it 
off. 

But ask any jockey how he'd like to 
take a Turkish bath every day for fifty 
days ! And how he would stand it 
when his arms and thighs were so re- 
duced that you could meet your thumb 
and forefinger around them, and could 
plainly trace the bones and the blood 
vessels ! And then again, there is the 
tongue. If you take a fast and really 
need the fast, you will find your tongue 
so coated that you can scrape it with a 
knife-blade. And if you break your 
fast, your tongue will clear in twenty- 
four hours; nothing in the world will 
coat it again but several days more of 
fasting. How would you propose to 
get around that diflBculty ? 

Such ideas have to do with fasting 
as seen by the outsider. I recollect 



THE FASTING CURE 

reading a diverting account of the 
fasting cure, in which the victim was 
portrayed as haunted by the ghost of 
beefsteaks and turkeys. But the per- 
son who is taking the fast knows noth- 
ing of these troubles, nor would there 
be much profit in fasting if he did. 
The fast is not an ordeal, it is a rest; 
and I have known people to lose in- 
terest in food as completely as if they 
had never tasted any in their lives. I 
know one lady who, to the consterna- 
tion of her friends and relatives, began 
a fast three days before Christmas and 
continued it until three days after 
New Year's; and on both the holidays 
she cooked a turkey and served it for 
her children. On another occasion, 
during a week's fast, she " put up " 
several gallons of preserves; the only 
inconvenience being that she had to 
call in a neighbour to taste them and 

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THE HUMORS OF FASTING 

see if they were done. I myself took a 
twelve-day fast while living alone with 
my little boy, and three times every day 
I went into the pantry and set out a 
meal for him. I was not troubled at 
all by the sight of the food. 

The longest fast of which I had 
heard when my article was written 
was seventy-eight days; but that 
record has since been broken, by a man 
named Richard Fausel, Mr. Fausel, 
who keeps a hotel somewhere in North 
Dakota, had presumably partaken too 
generously of the good cheer intended 
for his guests, for he found himself at 
the inconvenient weight of three hun- 
dred and eighty-five pounds. He 
went to a sanatorium in Battle Creek 
and there fasted for forty days (if my 
recollection serves me), and by dint of 
vigorous exercise meanwhile, he got 
rid of one hundred and thirty pounds. 

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THE FASTING CURE 

I think I never saw a funnier sight 
than Mr. Fausel at the conclusion of 
this fast, wearing the same pair of 
trousers that he had worn at the begin- 
ning of it. But the temptations of 
hotel-keeping are severe, and when he 
went back home, he found himself 
going up in weight again. This time 
he concluded to do the job thoroughly, 
and went to Macfadden's place in 
Chicago, and set out upon a fast of 
ninety days. That is a new record — 
though I sometimes wonder if it is 
quite fair to call it " fasting " when a 
man is simply living upon an internal 
larder of fat. 

It must be a curious experience to 
go for three months without tasting 
food. It is no wonder that the 
stomach and all the organs of assimila- 
tion forget how to do their work. The 
one danger in the fasting treatment is 

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THE HUMORS OF FASTING 

that when you break the fast, hunger 
is apt to come back with a rush, while, 
on the other hand, the stomach is weak, 
and the utmost caution is needed. If 
you yield to your cravings, you may fill 
your whole system with toxins, and 
undo all the good of the treatment ; but 
if you go slowly, and restrict yourself 
to very small quantities of the most 
easily assimilated foods, then in an in- 
credibly short time the body will have 
regained its strength. 

My experience has taught me that it 
is well not to be too proud at such a 
time, but to get some one to help you. 
And it ought to be some one who has 
fasted, for a person at the end of a fast 
is an agitating sight to his neighbours, 
and their one impulse is to get a 
" square meal " into him as quickly 
as possible. Quite recently there was 
one of my converts camping on my 

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THE FASTING CURE 

trail in New York City, and he called 
at the home of a relative of mine, an 
elderly lady, who does not take much 
stock in my eccentricities. I shall not 
soon forget her description of his 
appearance — ' * I thought he was going 
to die right there before my eyes! " 
she said. And no wonder, since the 
poor fellow had climbed four flights of 
stairs to the apartment. *' I know 
you'll get into trouble," added my 
relative, *' if you don't stop advising 
people to do such things ! ' ' 

I was interested enough in the ques- 
tion of fasting to spend some time at a 
sanatorium where they make a 
specialty of it. One can see a sicker 
looking collection of humans in such a 
place than anywhere else in the world, 
I fancy. In the first place, people do 
not take the fasting cure until they 
are looking desperate; and when they 

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THE HUMORS OF FASTING 

have got into the fast they look more 
desperate. At the later stages they 
sometimes take to wheelchairs ; and at 
all times they move with deliberation, 
and their faces wear serious expres- 
sions. They gather in little groups 
and discuss their symptoms; there is 
nothing so interesting in the world 
when you are fasting as to talk 
symptoms with a lot of people who are 
doing the same thing. There are some 
who are several days ahead of you, and 
who make you ashamed of your doubts ; 
and others who are behind you, and to 
whom you have to appear as an old 
campaigner. So you develop an esprit 
de corps, as it were — though that 
sounds as if I were trying to make a 
pun. 

All this may not seem very alluring 
but it is far better than a life-time of 
illness, such as many of these people 
have known before. I never knew that 

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THE FASTING CURE 

there was such terrible suffering in the 
world until I heard some of their 
stories; they would indeed be depress- 
ing company, were it not for the fact 
that now they are getting well. The 
reader may answer sarcastically that 
they think they are. But every 
Christian Scientist knows that this 
comes to the same thing : and I have 
talked with not less than a hundred 
people who have fasted for three days 
or more, and out of these there were 
but two or three who did not report 
themselves as greatly benefited. So I 
am accustomed to say that I would 
rather spend my time in a fasting 
sanatorium than in an ordinary 
" swell " hotel. The people in the 
former are making themselves well 
and know it; while the people in the 
latter are making themselves ill, and 
don't know it. 

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