Fasting is the apotheosis of the principle of moderation. Except in a modified form it can hardly be said as yet to have attained to the dignity of a method of dietotherapy, although in recent years it has been somewhat persistently advocated by certain irregular practitioners as a panacea for all kinds of disease; and as in their estimation everybody is diseased, occasional total abstinence is accordingly sanctioned by them. Perhaps because the very simplicity of the treatment commends itself to the parsimonious, or more likely because of the strength of the mimetic faculty in human nature, sporadic outbursts of the fasting fad occur at regular intervals, during which the most unwarrantable claims are made for its efficacy and the most unmitigated nonsense is uttered by its devotees.

The Layman's Views On Fasting

More or less lengthy treatises have been written by quite irresponsible individuals claiming to have wrought most marvellous cures by fasting, and as misconceptions on the matter which pass for scientific truth have crept into the daily Press and all sorts of periodicals, it can hardly be considered untimely to counteract the undoubted evil influence of such publications by an accurate description of the actual changes which take place in the body during fasting. Meanwhile, a brief glance at the layman's point of view and the errors into which he has fallen may not be out of place, and may indeed have a practical value.

The fundamental doctrine on which the layman's therapy is based consists in the dictum that disease is an encumbrance of the system with effete mal-assimilated foreign materials due to excess of nutriment, and is indeed simply an attempt of the body to rid itself of accumulated impurities. He labours to prove that disease cannot possibly be an entity, ignorant of the fact that medical men regard such an idea as a concept of mediaeval pathology. He advances no proof, however, for his own crude etiological teaching that the morbid material, which is at the root of all disease, is simply an excess, or due to an excess, of food, and that, as disease is only a manifestation of Nature's efforts to extrude this accumulation from the body, her efforts should not be frustrated, but seconded. Were this paradoxical doctrine applied in the manner suggested, it is to be feared that homicide would soon form another of the many charges to be laid at the door of the medical profession.

We quite agree that were we to eat just enough and no more than would suffice to balance the bodily waste and repair, what is called morbid accumulations would not be likely to arise, but we are not inclined to interpret this statement with the same strictness as he does. The body is not a test-tube in which the double decomposition of nutrient materials occurs in the precise and quantitative definite manner of a chemical reaction. The functioning of the various organs is conducted on much more spacious principles, and they are capable of dealing with widely varying quantities of nutriment, and with much more waste matter than is suggested by the shortsighted statement to which we have just referred. The excision of a kidney, or an eye, or even a stomach, is followed by such compensating efforts on the part of the body, that in a comparatively short space of time it is hardly missed. We cannot therefore agree with him when he says or implies that in the absence of strictly quantitative dieting disease must arise. Nor can we subscribe to his claims that food taken in excess of the bodily requirements for the .time will in no way help the body, but feed the disease, whereas by fasting we may cure the disease by withdrawing the nutriment on which it is dependent. Sufferers from neurasthenia are from every point of view diseased, and superalimentation should therefore intensify their disease with all its distress, but the delighted subject of a successful "rest cure" will not readily acquiesce in such a misstatement.