-six days; Mr. G. R., twenty-five
days; Mr. P. R., twenty-four days; and Miss E. Westing, forty-two days,
who, on the fortieth day, was able to sing with unusual clearness and
power, and ended her fast without losing a day from her duties as a
teacher of music.[3]

Wonderful are these fasts? Not in the physiological sense. These fasts
went on with only increasing comfort by day and more refreshing sleep
at night. It is quite another thing to endure the fasts of acute
sickness, for such they all are. That life is maintained for days and
weeks, even months, under pain, discomfort--under all the torturing
conditions of such diseases as pneumonia, typhoid fever, or inflammatory
rheumatism, is far more a matter to wonder over.

I may well wonder that Nature is powerful enough to cure the sick at all
even under the wisest aid; but with me the abiding wonder is that
physicians do not see that acute sickness is a loss of all the natural
conditions of digestion, with the wasting bodies the clearest evidence
that food is neither digested nor assimilated. I wonder with only
increasing impatience that the stomach is not understood as a machine
that Nature wills shall not be run to tax her resources when life is in
the throes of disease.

[Illustration: Copyrighted 1900, by Henry Ritter.

MISS ELIZABETH W. A. WESTING,

FORTIETH DAY OF FAST.]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The fasts conducted by Mr. Ritter constitute performances of the
most impressive kind as demonstrative evidence of the practical
physiology I have been teaching for many years. For the copyrighted
photographs he has kindly furnished I am very thankful, and to all who
have been willing to enhance the value and interest of this volume by
such eyesight illustrations.

[2] The accompanying illustration shows Mr. Thress on the fiftieth day
of his fast; weight loss, seventy-six pounds. Does the picture reveal
any skeleton condition?

[3] The accompanying illustration is a reproduced copyrighted picture of
Miss E. Westing. This picture was taken on the return home from her
duties at church on the fortieth day during the cold of winter; the
weight at the start being one hundred and ten pounds, at the close on
the forty-second day ninety-three pounds--loss, seventeen pounds.

XIII.

I had not been long engaged in observing the evolution of cure through
Nature when I began to suspect strongly, as before intimated, that
fasting is the true "medicine for the mind dise