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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