IN 1927, after sixteen fasts of four days each in sixteen weeks, the writer fasted on water ( inside and out ) for what is medically termed lung trouble, inflammation of the pancreas and heart trouble, having been given a few weeks to live as unresponsive to medical therapeutics. Convinced that the larger proportion of dead acid (which science admits is the cause of all disease in civilization) he had to fast away by compelling the viscera to live upon it along with water from without, had been put into the body after with water from without, had been pout into the body after the first symptoms of disease declared themselves,many years before the trouble were pronounced chronic ( a polite term for “incurable”), the writer determined to spare not effort to induce his fellows to fast immediately they fell ill.
The results of his campaign have been of the happiest kind and here are some of the particulars, typical of hundreds of cases he has supervised or influenced since 1918-cases not prejudiced by the ingestion of either herbs, patent medicines or foods, or drugs of any kind.
My first case, after experimenting upon fellow-creatures as dogs, cows, pigs, chickens, ducks, geese and houses, many of which ?I fasted on water alone for many days both in health and disease, was a baby. This baby was a month old. Nothing had nourished it from within fourteen days after its birth and its skin was loose and wrinkled, followed repeated attacks of diarrhoea nd sickness after every attempts repeated attacks of diarrhoea and sickness after every attempt to get its foods (changed almost hourly by doctor, nurse or mother) to hold. It looked, when I saw it, for all the world like a skinned rabbit, pink in appearance and cold and clammy like dead meat.
Children often recover from so-called dangerous disease in as many day as elderly people take weeks to free the viscera from the unassimilable matter congesting the natural functions. Working on that belief it occurred to me that the childs unrest (demonstrated by yells, moans and inability to sleep-luckily no drugging had been attempted, for few doctors nowadays try the “virtues” (?) of opium, etc., on babes) was caused by some severe and corresponding abnormality somewhere inside it, a phenomenon which might settle itself if the complete machine was rested.
Knowing that I had fasted newly-born chicks for as much as forty-eight hours at a stretch and reasoning that this babe was neither digesting nor assimilating any part of the various foods forced down its little throat, I persuaded the mother to give me charge of it. Worn out with the constant worry of the childs condition and being herself on a fast for an attack of pleurisy (which made her unable to give the child its natural food-from the breast) she wearily agreed. I started to feed the babe with water by the teaspoonful, a few each hour or so, and after twenty-four hours of this unorthodoxy it commenced to sleep.
I nursed it myself the whole of the time, during which its fretfulness disappeared and as an aid to the aim in view I would gently rub its trunk, its arms and its legs, with either my bare hand (a very smooth and soft hand, for I do much rubbing of my skin myself every day) or, occasionally, my hands and warm water. I kept up the treatment for five whole days. during which many changes visible to the eye, took place.
Its skin altered from the shrunken, flabby appearance I have mentioned to a thinner but firmer look, from a pink colour to a healthier tone of creamy- pink, its eyes to the bright, clear, innocent and docile look, one only sees in normal babies; the diarrhoea and vomiting ceased by the tenth hour and it slept most of the time during all the next four days. When in awakened I resumed the gentle rubbing of its flesh I had started on the first day and, though I nursed it most of the first forty-eight hours, I found it would lie and sleep in a cot quite peacefully after that. I was tremendously proud of my first human disciple and, since it had become normal I began to wonder how I should feed it now that the child appeared so much better.
I decided on arrange juice and gave it a teaspoonful at 12.30 on the sixth day. An hour later, no signs of unrest being evident, I risked a second teaspoonful and at 2 oclock a third. By night it had taken twelve teaspoonfuls of freshly squeezed neat orange juice, so I rubbed it again gently for an hour and put it to bed. A quiet restful night till 6 a.m. and a quiet peaceful awakening. I took it from its cot, rubbed its body for an hour with my hands and warm water and gave it more orange juice, later adding a little fresh raw milk (no I did not heat it or add anything to it) also administered with a teaspoon ( I never use a bottle).
For twelve months after this the growing child received nothing but fresh raw milk, orange juice ( in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth months pulped tomatoes, forked up ripe and bananas, a little honey out of the comb, and finely grated raw sweet apples) and water.
Amongst the interesting things accruing from firstly the cleansing of this little human machine “Do the first works” says the Guide I go by ” by fasting” and then the natural feeding and functional stimulation, were the painless appearance of the teeth, and the rapid development of the ability to creep, walk and run which is inherent in every child, but, alas, only too often retarded by such monstrosities as hot milk, bread and sugar and other clogging “foods” (?) given to babies which are largely, if not entirely, responsible for the host of ailments the orthodox regard as essential to the history of babyhood.
Some day the teachers of correct motherhood and babyhood will teach prevention ( the divine whisper of the present) of disease both physical and mental and the curriculum of that approaching day will be based on three correct things: Exercise, Dietetics and Thinking. The day as just as distant as the average layman cares to make it and it is an encouraging sign of the times that at no period in the history of civilization have matters of health (physical and mental culture) been studied with so much interest as in the past decade. The 6 oz. bottle, alcohol, serums and other artifices of the professional soothsayers have at last fallen into disrepute.
New thoughts are working. May I add in passing that the babe I mentioned earlier is by no means that last human of tender years I have made a disciple of the gospel of St. Matthew iv. 1,. 2, 3, 4 since 1917. For such abnormalities as mumps, swollen tonsils, earache, teething pains, wounds that did not heal quickly under orthodox conditions, adenoids, eruptions of the kind often mistaken for chicken pox and small pox, chicken pox itself, diphtheria,measles and there fevers common in children, I have prescribed fasts carried out successfully of from two or six days with the happiest results, following the fast in each case with a reformed and natural diet, a diet in which raw, fresh fruits, or fruit juices, and raw undoctored milk play an important part.
And dont children love such offerings of their Maker as milk uncooked, honey, fruits, eggs, often given raw, and as they grow older, salads and tomatoes.
My most remarkable test of faith in the efficacy and safety of the fasting cure was in the case of my own grand-daughter, then aged 2 2 years, in 1925. She fell from a stool on to a stone flag in the pantry and slit her upper lip as cleanly and deeply as if it had been slit by a razor.
Had we sent for a doctor, stitches would have been inserted to draw the cut parts together with consequent disfigurement for life a “harelip” almost. Our faith in mother nature is so strong that we determined on a fast. In fifteen days the parts were firmly knitted and the late Dr. Rabagliati, whom we called in towards the end to observe natures wondrous ways ( Dr. Rabagliati was in his later years a firm convert to nature cure and most unorthodoxy) congratulated us on our pluck and wisdom and thought it the most remarkable work of the Great Physician he had ever been privileged to see.
Nature never errs. She never lets us down if we have that faith in her which excludes the disastrous practice still so common, of trying to force her by artifice, instead of watching and waiting patiently while she calls up in her works the wondrous but unseen battalions of workmen within every body to do the most amazing ( in end results ) restorations to wholeness.
Of flu, diphtheria, and the host of functional disorders so common to civilized humans all the result of unnatural living I have only to think of the scores of people who have written to me since 1918, telling me of their remedial fasts in all manner of disorders, not forgetting neuritis ( a vague term applied to transgressors who speedily become arthritis if they follow the god of the rubbing bottle, aspirins, etc.), and neurasthenia (another vague term applied to folks in whom doctors, etc., find no organic unrest) where lunacy often supervenes if orthodoxy is practised and the first stages (unsuppressed) of sexual disorder where fasting has the touch of magic as in the common cold, sweating unnaturally, diarrhoea and too frequent menstruation, etc.
