Wednesday, November 30, 2022

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

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

                   THE HUMORS OF FASTING  

 

I 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   89 a     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   90     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;   01     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   94     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.   95     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   96     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   97     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   98     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   99     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.   100   

 

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