whatever the motive may be.'"

Tanner and Suci, "skin and bones?" Cowen weighed one hundred and
seventy-five pounds when he began his forty-two day fast, and lost only
thirty pounds. My case of acute rheumatism revealed a loss of only
forty pounds after a forty-six days' fast; and the woman of fifty-seven
who began eating on the forty-third day was so well padded with muscle
and fat as not to reveal the slightest suggestion of starvation as she
sat down to the first meal. "Skin and bones?" This is a matter for
months, and not for days.

"Falsifiers, these fasters?" Science settles important questions by
investigation, not by epithet.

XVI.

As I write the closing pages of this book, the most taxing case of
fasting that ever came under my care has ended in hunger, and I insert
it that all may know what tribulations will be theirs if they have any
part in letting their sick get well or die in that peace God and Nature
clearly design for all.

A man of large mould came to me, unknown, unbidden, from a distant city
on the seventeenth day of his fast. His appetite had been abolished by a
severe throat and bronchial attack, both of which had been relieved
before reaching me. Well posted in the theory of fasting, he came with
the declared intention of fasting until hunger or death would come.

For two or three weeks he was able to be about the city with his nearly
two hundred pounds of flesh; but there was an unknown, unknowable
disease of the bowels and stomach in slow development. There were a
dryness of the mouth and such aversion to food as to forbid all eating,
and he was deaf to my suggestion that he should at least taste some of
the liquid foods from time to time, to save me in the eyes of his
friends from a verdict of homicide, were we to fail to win a victory.
After more than fifty days without even a taste of food nausea and
vomiting were added to his woes, and when his friends became aware of
the many days without food no words I could utter saved me from the
severest condemnation. The anxiety that involved the sick bed only
depressed the patient, and when another physician had to be called to
relieve the pressure the last hope with him nearly departed.

The adviser was a man of high character and of unusual general and
professional acquirements. Behind him was the entire medical profession
and all its literature: behind me were only Nature, many-voiced--and the
patient. With us there was no lac