(Deals with nature's own remedy for disease, and how to make use of it.)
(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 newsfrom 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: Nobody 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 ships 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 upa 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 assimilative 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 scrape the materialoff 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 appetite 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 appetite 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 associated 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 snatched 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 wiseold 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 glass 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'tknow 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.
(Discusses various methods of building up the body after a fast, especially the milk diet.)
(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 glass; 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 quantities of liquid food every two hours for the first day. Then you can begin taking larger quantities, 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 aman 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 assimilate, 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 quantities of milk, and by the third day you may be taking a full glass 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 quantities 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 absolutemental 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 recoverit. 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 assured 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 circumstances 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 appetites 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 assimilate, and if you eat too much, you can make it impossible to assimilate 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 isabsolutely 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.
(Discusses some of the commoner human ailments, and what is known about their cause and cure.)
(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."
And, on the other hand, there are the "health cranks," who declare vehemently that the name "cold" is a misnomer and a trap for people's thoughts. Cold has nothing to do with it, they say, and point to arctic explorers who frequently get frozen to death, but do not "catch cold" until they get back into the warm rooms of civilization. As for drafts, the "health cranks" aver that a draft is merely "fresh air moving"; which is supposed to settle the matter. However, when you come to think about it, you realize that a cyclone is likewise merely "fresh air moving," so you have not decided the question by a phrase.
While I was writing these chapters on health I contracted a severe cold—which was a joke on me. The history of this cold is as clear in my mind as anything human can be, and it will serve for an illustration, showing how much truth the grandmothers have on their side, and how much the "health cranks" have.
To begin with, I had been overworking. All sorts of appeals come to me; hundreds of people write me letters, and I cannot bear to leave them unanswered. I accepted calls to speak, and invitations where I had to eat a lot of stuff of which my reason disapproves; so one morning I woke up with a slight sore throat. I fasted all day, and by evening felt all right. But there came another call, and I consented to take a long automobile ride on a cold and rainy night, andwhen I got back home, after five or six hours, I was thoroughly chilled, and my "cold" came on during the night.
This explanation will, I imagine, be satisfactory to all the grandmothers of the world. All the dear, good grandmothers know that an automobile ride on a cold, rainy night is enough to give any man "his death." But listen, grandmothers! I have lain out watching for deer all night in the late fall, with only a thin blanket to cover me, and gotten up so stiff with cold that I could hardly move; yet I did not "catch cold." When I was a youth, I have ridden a bicycle twenty miles to the beach in April, with snow on the ground, and plunged into the surf and swam, and then ridden home again. I have bathed in the sea when I had to run a quarter of a mile in a bathing suit along a frost-covered pier, and with an icy wind blowing through my bones; yet I never took cold from that, and never got anything but a feeling of exhilaration. So it must be that there is some reason why exposure causes colds at one time and not at another.
The explanation takes you over to the "health cranks." They understand that your blood-stream must be clogged, your bodily tone reduced by bad air and lack of exercise, and more especially by over-eating, or by an improperly balanced diet. But then most of them go to extremes, and insist that the automobile ride and the chilled condition of my body had nothing to do with my cold. But I know otherwise—I have watched the thing happen so often. In times when I was run down, the slightest exposure would cause me a cold, literally in a few minutes. I have got myself a sore throat going out to the wood-pile on a winter day with nothing on my head. I have got a cold by sitting still with wet feet, or by sitting in a draft on a warm summer day, when I had been perspiring a little. How to explain this I am not sure, but my guess is that you drive the blood away from the surface of the body at a time when it is weakened and exposed to infection, and you drive away the army of the white corpuscles, and give the battlefield of your body to the germs.
I know there are nature curists who argue that germs have nothing to do with disease; but they have never been able to convince me—germs are too real, and too many, and too easy to watch. If you leave a piece of meat exposed to the air in warm temperature, the germs in the air will settleupon it and begin to feed upon it and to multiply; the meat, being dead, is powerless to protect itself. But your nose and throat are also meat, and just as good food for the germs. The only difference is that this meat is alive, there is a living blood-stream circulating through it, and several score billions of the body's own kind of germs, the blood corpuscles. If these blood corpuscles are sound and properly nourished, and are brought to the place of infection, they are able to destroy all the common germs; so it is that you do not have diseases, but instead have health. But your health always implies a struggle of your organism against other organisms, and it is the business of your reason to watch your body and give all the help you can in protecting it. Coughs and colds, sore throats and headaches, are the first warnings that your defenses are being weakened. As a rule these ailments are not serious in themselves, but they are signs of a wrong condition, and if you neglect this condition, pretty soon you will find that you have to deal with something deadly.
My cure for a cold is to take an enema and a laxative, eat nothing for twenty-four hours, and drink plenty of water. If you have a severe cold or sore throat, you will be wise to lie in bed for a day or two, by an open window. You may also use sprays and gargles if you wish, but you will find them of little use, because the germs are deep in your mucous membranes, and cannot all be reached from the outside. In the old sad days of my ignorance I would get a cold, and go to the doctor, and have my throat and nose pumped full of black and green and yellow and purple liquids, which did me absolutely no good whatever; the cold would stay on for two or three weeks, sometimes for eight or ten weeks, and I would be miserable, utterly desperate. I was dying by inches, and not one of the doctors could tell me why.
The next most common ailment is a headache, and this means poisons in your blood-stream. It may be from improper diet, from alcohol, or drugs, or bad air, or nervous excitement. If it is none of these things, then you should begin to look for some organic difficulty, eye-strain, for example, or perhaps defects in the spine. The osteopaths and the chiropractors specialize on the spine, and have made important discoveries. Their doctrine is, in brief, that the nervous force which directs the blood-stream is carried tothe organs of the body by nerves which leave the spinal cord through openings between the vertebrae. If any of these openings are pinched, you have a diminished nerve supply, which means ill-health in that part of the body to which the nerve leads. That such trouble can be corrected by straightening the bones of the spine, seems perfectly reasonable; but like most people with a new idea, the discoverers proceed to carry it to absurd extremes. I have before me an official chiropractic pamphlet which states that vertebral displacement is "the physical and perpetuating cause of ninety-five per cent of all cases of disease; the remaining five per cent being due to subluxations of other skeletal segments." Naturally people who believe this will devote nearly all their study to the bones and the nervous system. But surely, there are other parts of your body which are necessary besides bones and nerves! And what if some of these parts happen to be malformed or defective? What if your eyes do not focus properly, and you are continually wearing out the optic nerve, thus giving yourself headaches and neurasthenia? What if you have an appendix that has been twisted and malformed from birth, and is a center of infection so long as it remains in the body?
Several years ago I had an experience with the appendix, from which I learned something about one of the commonest of human ailments, constipation, or sluggishness of the bowels. This is a cause of innumerable chronic ailments grouped under the head of auto-intoxication, or the poisoning of the body by the absorption into the system of the products of fermentation and decay in the bowels. The bowels should move freely two or three times every day, and the movements should be soft. I suffered from constipation for some twenty years, and tried, I think, every remedy known both to science and to crankdom. In the beginning the doctors gave me drugs which by irritating the intestinal walls cause them to pour out quantities of water, and hurry the irritating substances down the intestinal tract. That is all right for an emergency; if you have swallowed a poison, or food which is spoiled, or if you have overeaten and are ill, get your system cleaned out by any and every device. But if you habitually swallow mild poisons, which is what all laxatives are, you weaken the intestinal tract, and you have to take more and more of these poisons, and you get less results. We may set down as positivethe statement that drugs are not a remedy for constipation.
Next comes diet. Eat the rough and bulky foods, say the nature curists, and stimulate the intestinal walls to activity. I tried that. I listened to the extreme enthusiasts, and boiled whole wheat and ate it, and consumed quantities of bran biscuit, and of a Japanese seaweed which Dr. Kellogg prepares, and of petroleum oil, and even the skins of oranges, which are most uncomfortable eating, I assure you. I would eat things like this until I got myself a case of diarrhea—and so was cured of constipation for a time! Strange as it may seem to you, there are even people who tell you to eat sand. I listened to them, and ate many quarts.
Then there is exercise. MacFadden taught me a whole series of exercises for developing the muscles of the abdominal walls and the back, which are greatly neglected by civilized man. The fundamental cause of constipation is a sluggish life, and to exercise our bodies is a duty; but to me it was always an agony of boredom to lie on a bed and wiggle my abdomen for a quarter of an hour. The same thing applies to hot water treatments, which are effective, but a nuisance and a waste of time. I never could keep them up except when I was in trouble.
Three or four years ago I began to notice a continual irritating pain in my right side, which I quickly realized must lie in the appendix. I tried massage, and hot and cold water treatments, and my favorite remedy, a week's fast. The pain disappeared, but it returned, so finally I decided, to the dismay of my physical culture friends, to have the appendix out. For years I had been reading the statements of nature curists, that the appendix is an important and vital part of the body, which pours an oil or something into the intestinal tract, and so helps to prevent constipation. Well, evidently my appendix wasn't doing its job, so I took it to a good surgeon. What I found was that it had been twisted and malformed from birth, so that it was a center of continuous infection. From the time I had that operation, I have never had to think about the subject of constipation. This experience suggests to me how easy it is for people to make statements about health which have no relationship to facts.
I do not recommend promiscuous surgery, and I perfectly well realize that if human beings would take proper care of their health, the great proportion of surgical operations wouldbe unnecessary. I realize, also, that surgeons get paid by the job, and therefore have a money interest in operating, and it is perfectly futile to expect that none of them will ever be influenced by the profit motive. Nevertheless, it is true that sometimes surgical operations are necessary, and that by standing a little temporary inconvenience you can save yourself a life-time of discomfort.
Take, for example, rupture. The human body has here a natural weakness, from which there results a dangerous and uncomfortable affliction. Hundreds of thousands of men are going around all their lives wearing elaborate and expensive trusses which are almost, if not entirely useless, and trying advertised "cures" which are entirely fakes. An operation takes an hour or two, and two or three weeks in bed, and when our government drafted its young men into the army and found that fourteen in every thousand of them had rupture, it shipped them into the hospitals wholesale and sewed them up. It happens that rupture affords one case where scar tissue is stronger than natural tissue, and there were practically no returns from the great number of army cases.
Likewise you find extreme statements repeated concerning the evils of vaccination; but if you will read Parkman's "History of the Jesuits in North America," you will see the horrible conditions under which the Indians lived in the United States—noble savages, you understand, entirely uncontaminated by civilized white men, and whole populations regularly wiped out every few years by epidemics of smallpox. That these epidemics ceased was due to the discovery that by infecting the body with a mild form of the disease, it could be made to develop substances which render it immune to the deadly form. Here in California we have a law which makes vaccination for school children optional, and so we may some day have another epidemic to test the theories of the anti-vaccinationists.
I know, of course, the dreadful stories of people who have been given syphilis and other diseases by impure vaccines. I don't know whether such stories are true; but I do know that people who live in houses are sometimes killed by earthquakes and by lightning, yet we do not cease to live in houses because of this chance. It seems to me that the remedy for such vaccination evils is not to abolish vaccination,but to take more care in the manufacture of our vaccines.
This danger is removed by using vaccines which are sterile, and are made especially for each person. Germs are taken from the sick person, and injected into an animal. The body of the animal develops with great rapidity the "anti-bodies" necessary to resistance to the germs; and as these "anti-bodies" are chemical products, not affected by heat, we can take a serum from the animal, sterilize it, and then inject it into the system of the patient, thus increasing resistance to the disease. I admit that the best way to increase such resistance is to take care of your health; but sometimes we confront an emergency, and must use emergency remedies. We have serums that really cure diphtheria and meningitis, and one that will prevent lock-jaw; anyone who has ever seen with his own eyes how the deadly membranes of diphtheria melt away as a result of an injection, will be less dogmatic about the efforts of science to combat disease.
Of course it is much pleasanter if you can destroy the source of the disease, and keep it from getting into the human body. Every few years the southern part of our country used to be devastated by yellow fever epidemics. Every kind of weird and fantastic remedy was tried; people would go around with sponges full of vinegar hung under their noses; they would burn the clothing and bedding of those who died of the disease; they would wear gloves when they went shopping, so as not to touch the money with their hands. But at last medical experimenters traced the disease to a certain kind of mosquito, and now, if we drain the swamps and screen our houses and stay in doors after sundown, we do not get yellow fever, nor malaria either. In the same way, if we keep our bodies clean with soap and hot water, we do not get bitten by lice, and so do not die of typhus. If we take pains with our drains and water supply, so that human excrement does not get into it, and if we destroy the filth-carrying housefly, we do not have epidemics of typhoid.
But under conditions of battle it is not possible for men to take these precautions, and so when they go into the army they get a dose of typhoid serum. And this illustrates the difference between a true or hygienic remedy for disease, and a temporary or emergency remedy. If you say that you want to abolish war, and with it the need for typhoidvaccination, I cheerfully agree with you in this. All that I am trying to do is to point out the folly of flying to extremes, and rejecting any remedy which may help. What is the use of making the flat statement that vaccinations and serums never aid in the cure of disease, when any man can see with his own eyes the proof that they do? In the Spanish war, before typhoid vaccination, many times more soldiers died of this disease than died of bullets; but in the late war there was practically no typhoid at all in the army camps. On the other hand, it was noticed that the men who had just come in, and who therefore had just been vaccinated, were considerably more susceptible to influenza; which shows that vaccination does reduce the body condition for a time. The reader may say that in this case I am trying to sit on both sides of the fence; but the truth is that I am trying to keep an open mind, and to consider all the facts, and to avoid making rash statements.
One of the statements you hear most frequently is that drugs can never remedy disease, or help in remedying it. Now, I abhor the drugging system of the orthodox medical men; I have talked with them, and heard them talk with one another, and I know that they will mix up half a dozen different substances, in the vague hope that some one of them will have some effect. Even when they know definitely the effects they are producing, they are in many cases merely suppressing symptoms. On the other hand, however, it is a fact that medical science has had for a generation or two a specific which destroys the germs of one disease in the blood, without at the same time injuring the blood itself. That disease is malaria, and the drug is quinine. Of course, the way to avoid malaria is to drain the swamps; but you cannot do that all at once, nor can you always screen your house and stay in at sundown. When you first go into a country, you have no house to screen, and some emergency will certainly arise that exposes you to mosquito bites. So you will need quinine, and will be foolish not to use it, and know how to use it.
Recently medical chemists discovered another remedy, this time for syphilis. It is called salvarsan, and while it does not always cure, it frequently does. In laboratories today men are working over the problem of constructing a combination of molecules which will destroy the germ of sleeping sickness, without at the same time injuring the blood.If they find it, they will save hundreds of millions of lives. I do not see why we cannot recognize such a possibility, while at the same time making use of physical culture, of diet and fasting.
When the manuscript of this book was sent to the printer, there appeared in this place a paragraph telling of the work of Dr. Albert Abrams of San Francisco, in the diagnosis and cure of disease by means of radio-active vibrations. As the book is going to press, the writer finds himself in San Francisco, attending Dr. Abrams' clinics; and so he finds it possible to give a more extended account of some fascinating discoveries, which seem destined to revolutionize medical science. If I were to tell all that I have seen with my own eyes in the last twelve days, I fear the reader would find his powers of credulity overstretched, so I shall content myself with trying to tell, in very sober and cautious language, the theory upon which Abrams is working, and the technic which he has evolved.
Modern science has demonstrated that all matter is simply the activity of electrons, minute particles of electric force. This is a statement which no present-day physicist would dispute. The best evidence appears to indicate that a molecule of matter is a minute reproduction of the universe, a system of electrons whirling about a central nucleus. No eye has ever beheld an electron, for it is billions of times smaller than anything the microscope makes visible; but we can see the effects of electronic activity, and all modern books of physics give photographs of such. It is possible to determine the vibration rates of electrons, and to Dr. Abrams occurred the idea of determining the vibration rates of diseased tissue and disease germs. He discovered that it was invariably the same; not merely does all cancerous material, for example, yield the same rate, but the blood of a person suffering from cancer yields that rate, at all times and under all circumstances. The vibration of cancer, of tuberculosis, of syphilis—each is different, uniform and invariable. Likewise in the blood are other vibrations, uniform and dependable, which reveal the sex and age of the patient, the virulence of the disease and the period of its duration—yes, and even the location in the body, if there be some definite infected area. So here is a modern miracle, an infallible device for the diagnosis of disease. Dr. Abrams does not have to see the patient; all he has to have is a drop of blood on a piece of white blotting paper, and he sits in his laboratory and tells all about it,and somewhere several thousand miles away—in Toronto or Boston or New Orleans—a surgeon operates and finds what he has been told is there!
And that is only the beginning of the wonder; because, says Abrams, if you know the vibration rate of the electrons of germs, you can destroy those germs. It used to be a favorite trick of Caruso to tap a glass and determine its musical note, and then sing that note at the glass and shatter it to bits. It is well known that horses, trotting swiftly on a bridge, have sometimes coincided in their step with the vibration of the bridge and thus have broken it down. On that same principle this wizard of the electron introduces into your body radio-activity of a certain rate—and shall I say that he cures cancer and syphilis and tuberculosis of many years standing in a few treatments? I will not say that, because you would not and could not believe me. I will content myself with telling what my wife and I have been watching, twice a day for the past twelve days.
The scene is a laboratory, with rows of raised seats at one side for the physicians who attend the clinic. There is a table, with the instruments of measurement, and Dr. Abrams sits beside it, and before him stands a young man stripped to the waist. The doctor is tapping upon the abdomen of this man, and listening to the sounds. You will find this the weirdest part of the whole procedure, for you will naturally assume that this young man is being examined, and will be dazed when some one explains that the patient is in Toronto or Boston or New Orleans, and that this young man's body is the instrument which the doctor uses in the determining of the vibration rates of the patient's blood. Dr. Abrams tried numerous instruments, but has been able to find nothing so sensitive to electronic activity as a human body. He explains to his classes that the spinal cord is composed of millions of nerve fibres of different vibration rates; hence a certain rate communicated to the body, is automatically sorted out, and appears on a certain precise spot of the body in the form of increased activity, increased blood pressure in the cells, and hence what all physicians know as a "dull area," which can be discovered by what is known as "percussion," a tapping with a finger. To map out these areas is merely a matter of long and patient experiment; and Abrams has been studying this subject for some twenty years—he is author ofa text-book on what is known as the "reactions of Abrams." So now he provides the world with a series of maps of the human body; and he sits in front of his "subject," and his assistant places a specimen of blood in a little electrically connected box, and sets the rheostat at some vibration number—say fifty—and Dr. Abrams taps on a certain square inch of the abdomen of his "subject," and announces the dread word "cancer." Then he places the electrode on another part of the "subject's" body, and taps some more, and announces that it is cancer of the small intestine, left side; some more tapping, and he announces that its intensity is twelve ohms, which is severe; and pretty soon there is speeding a telegram to the physician who has sent this blood specimen, telling him these facts, and prescribing a certain vibration rate upon the "oscilloclast," the instrument of radio-activity which Dr. Abrams has devised.
Now, you watch this thing for an hour or two, and you say to yourself: "Here is either the greatest magician in the history of mankind, or else the greatest maniac." You may have come prepared for some kind of fraud, but you soon dismiss that, for you realize that this man is desperately in earnest about what he is doing, and so are all the physicians who watch him. So you seek refuge in the thought that he must be deluding himself and them, perhaps unconsciously. But you talk with these men, and discover that they have come from all over the country, and always for one reason—they had sent blood specimens to Abrams, and had found that he never made a mistake; he told them more from a few drops of the patient's blood than they themselves had been able to find out from the whole patient. And then into the clinic come the doctor's own patients—I must have heard sixty or eighty of them tell their story and many of them have been lifted from the grave. People ten years blind from syphilis who can see; people operated on several times for cancer and given up for dying; people with tumors on the brain, or with one lung gone from tuberculosis. It is literally a fact that when you have sat in Abrams' clinic for a week, all disease loses its terrors.
This, you see, is really the mastery of life. If we can measure and control the minute universe of the electron and the atom, we have touched the ultimate source of our bodily life. I might take chapters of this book to tell you of the strange experiments I have seen in this clinic—showing you, for instance, how these vibrations respond to thought, howby denying to himself the disease the patient can for a few moments cancel in his body the activity of the harmful germs; showing how the reactions differ in the different sexes and at different ages, and how they respond to different colors and different drugs. Abrams' method has revealed the secret of such efficacy as drugs possess—their work is done by their radio-activity, and not by their chemical properties. Also the problem of vaccination has been solved—for Abrams has discovered a dread new disease, which is bovine syphilis, originally caused in cattle by human inoculation, and now reintroduced in the human being by vaccination, and becoming the agent which prepares the soil of the body for such disorders as tuberculosis and cancer. And it appears that we can all be rendered immune to these diseases, by a few electronic vibrations, introduced into our bodies in childhood; so is opened up to our eyes a wonderful vision of a new race, purified and made fit for life. So here at last is science justified of her optimism, and our faith in human destiny forever vindicated. Take my advice, whoever you may be that are suffering, and find out about this new work and help to make it known to the world.
There are many romances of medical science, some of them fascinating as murder mysteries and big game hunting. Turn to McMasters' "History of the People of the United States" and read his account of the terrible epidemic of yellow fever in Philadelphia a hundred years ago; I have already referred to the weird and incredible things the people did in their effort to ward off this plague—sponges of vinegar under their noses and "fever fires" burning in the streets; and then a mosquito would fly up and bite them, and in a few hours they would be dead! Or what could be stranger than the tracing of the bubonic plague, which has cost literally billions of human lives, to a parasite in the blood of fleas which live on the bodies of rats! Or what could be more unexpected than the tracing of our rheumatic aches and twinges to the root canals of the teeth!
One of the common ailments which afflict poor humanity is rheumatism, a cause of endless suffering. It was supposed to be due to damp climate and exposure, and this is true to a certain extent, in the same way that colds are due to exposure. But the investigators realized that there must be some bodily condition rendering one susceptible, and they set to work to trace this condition down. The pains of rheumatism are caused by uric acid settling in the jointsof the body. What causes the uric acid? Well, there is uric acid in red meat, so let us forbid rheumatic people to eat it! But this is overlooking the fact that the human body itself is a uric acid factory; and also the fact that uric acid taken into the stomach may not remain uric acid by the time it gets to the blood-stream. We know that you may eat a great deal of fruit acid without necessarily making acid blood. On the other hand, you can make acid blood by eating a lot of sugar! So you see it isn't as simple as it sounds.
Rheumatism has been traced to its lair, which is found to be the roots of the teeth. Here is a part of the body difficult to get at, and as a consequence of bad diet and unwholesome ways of living, infections will start there, and pus sacs be formed, and the poisons absorbed into the blood-stream and distributed through the body. The first thought is to draw the infected teeth; but that is a serious matter, because you need your teeth to chew your food. So the dentist has to go through a complicated process of opening up the tooth and cleaning out the root canals, and treating the infected spots at the roots. Then he has to fill the tooth all the way down to the roots, leaving no place for infection to gather. This, of course, takes time and costs money, and is one more illustration of the fact that there is one health law for the rich and another health law for the poor.
All the time that I write these chapters about health I feel guilty. I know that the wholesome food I recommend costs money, and I know that surgery and dentistry cost money—yes, even sunlight and fresh air and recreation; even a fast, because you have to rest while you take it, and you have to have a roof over your head, and warmth in winter time, and somebody to wait upon you when you are weak. I know that for a great many of the people who read what I write, all these things are impossible of attainment; I know that for the great majority of the common people the benefits of science do not exist. Science discovers how to prevent disease, but the discoveries are not applied, because the profit system controls the world, and the profit system wants the labor of the poor, regardless of what happens to their health. If the people fall ill, they are thrown upon the scrap heap, and the profit system finds others to take their place.
Take, for example, tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is a germ infection, but it practically never gets hold upon a human body except when the body is reduced by undernourishment and lack of fresh air. Tuberculosis, therefore, is a disease of slums and jails. It is definitely and indisputably a disease of poverty. It could be wiped off the face of the earth in a single generation; and the same is true of typhus and typhoid. There is another whole host of ailments which could be wiped out by measures of public hygiene, plus education. This includes all the infant diseases, and the deadly venereal diseases. But the profit system stands in the way; and so, in these closing paragraphs of this Book of the Body, I say that there is one disease which is the deadliest of all, and the source of all others, and that disease is poverty.
I know a certain physician to the rich, who is an honest and conscientious man. He said, "I loath my work. I am wasting my time. I am called in by these fat, over-fed rich people in their leisure class hotels, and what am I to say to them? Shall I say to them, 'You are living an abnormal life, and you can never be well until you cut out root and branch all your habits of self indulgence which are destroying you?' But no, I can't say that—not one time in a thousand. I am expected to be polite and serious, and to listen to them while they tell the long tiresome story of their symptoms, and I have to encourage them, and give them some temporary device that will remove some of the symptoms of their trouble."
And what should one say to this honest physician? Should one tell him to go and be a physician to the poor? Would he be any happier there? He could tell the poor the causes of their diseases, and they would listen patiently—they are trained to listen, and to accept what they are told. Here is a girl living in an inside bedroom in a tenement, and working ten or eleven hours a day in an unventilated factory, and she is ill with tuberculosis. The physician tells her that she needs plenty of fresh air and rest, and a lot of eggs and milk in her diet. He tells her that, and he knows that she has as much chance of carrying out his orders as of flying to the moon. Or maybe he comes upon a typhoid epidemic, and discovers, as happened to a friend of mine in Chicago, that there is defective plumbing in some houses owned by the political leader of the district. Or maybe it is a caseof venereal disease, in a young man who was drafted into the army and turned loose amid the joys of Paris. Maybe it is just a commonplace, every-day story of a room full of school children, 22 per cent of them undernourished, as is the case in New York City, and the parents out of work a part of the time, and with no possibility in their lives of ever earning enough to feed the children properly. When you confront these universal facts of our present social order, you realize that the problem of disease is not merely a problem of the body, but is a problem of the mind as well; a problem of politics and religion and philosophy, of the whole way of thinking of the so-called civilized world. A book of health which did not point out these facts would be, not a book of health, but a book of sham.
But meantime, while we are trying to change the world's ideas, we have to live, and we can do our work better if we keep as well as possible. I have tried to point out the way; it is, as you can see, a matter in part of the body and in part of the mind. All the bodily régime here laid out has its basis in mental habits; all wise and wholesome ways of life can, at the age when our minds are plastic, be made into "second nature"—things which we do automatically, without effort or temptation to do otherwise. This is the real secret of true happiness in the conduct of our personal lives; to acquire self-control, to rule our desires and our passions, not harshly and spasmodically, but serenely, as one drives a car which he thoroughly understands. It is in vain that we preach freedom to men who have not this self-mastery; as the poet tell us: "The sensual and the dark rebel in vain, slaves of their own compulsion." And of all the personal possessions which man can attain on this earth, the most precious is the one of a sound mind controlling a sound body. I close this book by quoting some verses written by Sir Henry Wotton three hundred years ago, which I have all my life considered one of the noblest pieces of poetry in our heritage:
A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,Y