First let us hear Dr. W. A. Evans, who writes How to Keep Well, a syndicated letter at present published daily in various newspapers throughout the country. Dr. Evans has this to say about fasting:

"On the shelves of the Crerar Library (Chicago), or any other library of similar equipment, are many books on fasting. I know none that is even half way scientific, nor a quarter way trustworthy. One reason for this is that fasting is the sport of amateurs, as one writer calls it. He might have added that it is the fad of faddists and the field of the faker. To further complicate matters, it is all mixed up with religion. Every religion has always had religious feasts, which are gorges, and its fasts.

"Prof. Morgulis of the University of Nebraska has just put out a truly scientific book on the subject. The only trouble about this book is that it is so accurate, scientific, and technical that the man who needs it most cannot understand it.

"Fasting is a remedial agent of enormous power--power for good and power for harm. Nothing the doctor carries in his saddle bags approximates fasting in its therapeutic possibilities. In fact, a doctor attends a patient through a long illness, giving him four kinds of medicine four times every day, it is probable that the under-nutrition through which the patient has passed by reason of his loss of appetite, vomiting, diarrhoea, or other quality of his disease, or the dieting to which he was subjected, influenced both the patient and his disease far more than did the medicine which was given.

Comes now Dr. Frederick M. Allen, A. B., M. D., of the Rockefeller Institute Hospital, who about the year, 1915, advanced his "discovery" of the "starvation treatment" of diabetes. There is no need to devote more time to him than to say that as far back as 1878 Dr. Edward Hooker Dewey successfully employed the fast in treating diabetes mellitus.

A quotation now follows from Fasting and Undernutrition, the book of Professor Morgulis of the University of Nebraska College of Medicine. This is the author mentioned by Dr. Evans, who attributes to the Professor the only scientific work written upon the fast--so scientific in fact that the man who needs it most cannot understand it. In his book Professor Morgulis has devoted himself solely to the physiological aspect of abstinence from food with its effects upon animals in health, neglecting its therapeutical possibilities, excepting to say in his preface:--"In the hands of the skilful practitioner of medicine total abstinence from food may prove a wonderfully effective weapon in restoring health. The therapeutic value of inanition, however, should be studied experimentally and not be left to the judgment of amateur enthusiasts. The practical value of inanition will never be fully utilized until both laymen and the medical profession lose their instinctive fear of fasting". (My italics.) Professor Morgulis, scientific in mind and expression though he may be, makes in the statement given the egregious error of confusing inanition, starvation, with fasting, forgetting or perhaps not knowing that there is no malnutrition comparable to the starvation that accompanies overeating.

Quotations from the writings of these men of science are made thus at length for several reasons. It is desired that the reader may be impressed with the truth that fasting for therapeutic purposes--fasting for the prevention and relief of disease--has been known and practiced for all of the historic ages of man. It is also to be emphasized that all animate nature, save man, instinctively refuses food when physical balance is disturbed. And, whether the discussion conducted herein be from the standpoint of science "scientific" or not, it will stand the sole test that makes for truth in that the results connoted are based upon long, faithful, and accurate observation and experiment of minds as capable of receiving and recording the phenomena connected with abstinence from food in illness or in health as are those of the scientists quoted. And it should possess the further distinction of being easily understandable by him who needs it most.

The premises of the argument underlying the application of a fast for therapeutic will bear repetition. Disease, in whatever form evidenced, whatever the symptom displayed, has its origin at the threshold of digestion. In disease itself lies relief. Disease and cure, viewed from the standpoint of nature, are a unity. The former may not be suppressed lest the latter fail of attainment. When an organism, constituted as is the body of man, becomes the victim of its own violation of hygienic law, when the avenues through which vital force, the source of life, is transmitted, are permitted to become obstructed, unless these channels are cleansed, are opened for the passage of energy, life ceases and death occurs. In order that the passages through which the life principle reaches the separate parts of the human body may be free and unobstructed, a system of elimination exists. Building of tissue--assimilation--takes place as the result of food ingested and digested, but health depends upon a balance between nutrition and elimination. And there is no eliminative agency known to science comparable with a properly administered fast.

Dr. Evans has said that the book of Professor Morgulis is a treatise upon the fast that is truly scientific. And there is no doubt that Fasting and, Undernutrition is a thesis most carefully prepared and couched in purely scientific terms. But it deals entirely with inanition in healthy animals and with a few short fasts undertaken by healthy human professionals. Fasting in health and fasting when disease is in evidence are two distinct processes, and the writer believes that even science must concede differing chemical transformations and reactions in sickness and in health. And further, because the results of many years of observation, experiment, and induction are placed before students in terms that are easily understandable, it must not be concluded that the truths discovered and related are non-scientific and are to be discarded as fallacies. Yet the professed scientist is most free in offering the sort of criticism mentioned and inferred, and this has its weight with those who are subservient to intellectual authority, with those who are either unwilling or incapable of thinking for themselves.