Part 25

Gentlemen, you have treated acute sickness in all its forms, and you have had many cases in which, because of irritable stomachs, neither food nor medicine could be given. Day after day you have seen the wasting of the bodies, and you have also seen mental aberration or stupor lessen day by day as the disease lessened its grasp upon the brain-centres, and finally when the point of natural hunger was reached, you never found the lost pounds a matter of physical discomfort or mental abnormality or weakness; rather you have always found at this point a mental condition in every way the most highly satisfactory. I never saw brighter eyes, a happier expression on every line, than revealed by a woman after a fast of forty-four days, in which acute disease had reduced the weight forty pounds.

All overweight not due to dropsy or other disease is due to eating more food than the waste demands. As an abnormal condition overweight has received a great deal of attention in the way of misguided effort to both prevention and cure. These efforts are such conspicuous failures that even the patent medicine man has not found his "anti-fat nostrums" the happy means to fortune. There have been all kinds of limits built around bills of fare, but sooner or later Nature revolts and they are given up.

The reason that certain people take on weight easily and become "stout," is because of constitutional tendency, good digestion, and excess of food. As a general fact, the overweights are "large feeders," and they not only look well but feel well, for they have much less stomach trouble than the average mortal, and in cheerful endowment of soul they rank the highest among all the people.

In spite of my philosophy, I, who am one of the leanest of the kind, look upon the stoutness of those in the early prime of life with something of both envy and admiration; they seem so ideally conditioned to enjoy the best of all things on earth. But it is quite a serious matter when the muscles and brain have to deal with pounds in excess by the score, even as if the victim were doomed to wear clothes padded with so many pounds of shot.

Why some people take on fat easily even with the smallest of meals, why some of the largest eaters are of the leanest, are matters to talk about but not to know about. For my purpose it is sufficient that I assert that overweight can be prevented by an habitual limitation of the daily food to the daily need; that it can be cut down to any desired degree by stopping the supply, a method that is not attended with any violence to the constitution, nor even to comfort or power. This plan has the great advantage of adding to the curative energy of disease as well; and more than this, there is a change attending the loss that seems at first phenomenal, as involving a physiological contradiction--there is an actual increase in muscle-weight as the bloat and fat weight go down.

How is this, you ask? Here is the explanation: As the fat weight increases by surplus food, so decrease the disposition and ability for general exercise. As it declines, so do muscle and all the other energies increase, and the use of muscle within physiological limit tends to restore the normal weight and strength.

There are no overweights who would not receive the greatest benefit by a fast that would diminish the pounds to that of the ripest maturity of life, a fast that would be determined by the time required to reach the desired number of pounds. As a means this method is available to all, and practical where due physiological light will enable it to be carried out with no starving concern to disable vital power.

As a general fact, the No-breakfast Plan has been attended by a highly satisfactory reduction of surplus pounds; where there has been a failure it has been due to such an increase of digestive power as really to add to both an increase of the average amount of daily food and of power to digest it. For instance, one of my fellow citizens, weighing not less than three hundred and thirty pounds some years ago, gave up his morning meals. This was attended with entire relief from frequent bilious spells; but the average of daily food was increased and the business of a barber did not add anything to muscle development. Finally from mere excess of weight he became a prisoner to his house and yard, unable to walk a square without the greatest difficulty; and yet there were two enormous meals put into a stomach daily that did not complain, and the weight increased until the three hundred and seventy-five pound notch was nearly reached. He heard about the Rathbun fast, and I was able to persuade him to come down to one light meal daily, and day after day bonds were loosened. After a year there have been nearly seventy-five pounds lost, and there is ability to labor and to walk several miles daily.

Very many thin persons have gained as high as forty pounds by reason of the larger degree of muscle exercise. Since last writing, this word has come from Miss K., who one year ago was at the asylum eating several meals a day in bed with suicidal intent. She left that bed with a weight of one hundred and forty pounds, and, as I have mentioned before, lost twenty pounds of it by her fast. My last news is from a letter written the day after a twenty-five-mile ride among the mountains with a soul as free and joyous as there are freedom and joy with the birds whose songs greeted her rapt ears from every treetop. She writes of a gain of twenty-four pounds since the fast, and states that the glasses she has worn for thirteen years are wanted no longer!

I feel that I need not multiply words as to the ability and utility of bringing all overweight down to the physiological normal and of keeping it there. I could fill hundreds of pages with the joyous testimonies of those who have been relieved of many surplus pounds, with numerous accompanying ailings; they all tell the same story, and I will only add this, that there is no physiological excuse for any mortal to carry around weight that disables.

Not very many months ago ex-Governor Flower, of New York, a statesman of national fame, a man of largest public spirit, a most valuable citizen, and Colonel Robert Ingersoll, an orator of world-wide fame and of great nobility of soul, dropped as beeves beneath the stroke of an ax because of a fracture of brittle bloodvessels. In both of these cases not many less pounds than a hundred had needlessly accumulated.

Could I have had the Colonel's ear when I last saw him as a listener to almost matchless oratory, whose rotundity of belt was to be measured by the yard, I would have addressed him as follows: "My dear Colonel, when I last saw you you were just filled out enough to be the joy of your tailor, and as a picture of health in form and looks you were ideal. You were then eating the meals of a woodchopper; and merely because food tastes good and does not seem to hurt you, you have been doing the same during the nearly score and a half of years since I have seen you. You have been eating more food every day in proportion to general muscle exercise than the hardest toiler does in a week, and your vast bulk evidences against you."

After explaining to him the structural possibilities of apoplexy as a legacy, as I have to you in the cases of insanity, I would continue: "Now by virtue of a possible ancestral weakness of your brain arteries this may happen: the arterial walls, because of habitual food in excess, may undergo a fatty, limy degeneration that will make a rupture possible, with death or paralysis of one-half or more of the body as the direct result; or the small arteries may have their walls so thickened as not to permit enough blood to circulate in order duly to nourish parts of the brain they supply; hence softening of the structure and more or less imbecility.

"The history of all overweights is that of a decline of muscle energy, and very generally of the amount of muscle activity as the pounds and years increase; but no cut in the amount of daily food so long as it can be taken with relish and disposed of without any special protesting from the stomach. This is the history of by far the largest majority of those sudden deaths due to cerebral hemorrhage, and also the history of most of the cases of imbecility with the overweights.

"Now, Colonel, you should make a radical parting with those surplus pounds by a fast that may extend into months, or take one of the lightest of meals once a day. Follow this out rigidly until you have lost a hundred pounds, and then by as much will you be not only free from disease, but free also from the danger of disease."

My experience with cases of epilepsy, or "fits," is confined to a half dozen cases, in which permanent relief seems to be assured. There is an acquired structural abnormality behind the spasms, acquired from surplus food, with a cure to be reached ultimately in most cases along these physiological lines.

XIV.

I shall not take time in telling the evils of alcoholics. It would not be more enlightening were I to spend hours in telling of wrecked lives, of wrecked homes, of prisons filled with their victims, of the immense loss to states and nations from the loss to sufferers and the loss they inflict. Alcoholism has no sense for frowning, ominous statistics, for it is a disease to be rationally treated, a disease to be rationally avoided.

In the light of later science the word "stimulants" has become a misnomer as applied to alcoholics; the term, no doubt, came into use from the fact that under their use there is more endurance to both physical and mental ills, an endurance or indifference ascribed to stimulation.

If power is stimulated by their use, then there should be a rise in temperature whereby severe cold is better endured; but this is not the fact any more than that temperature is lowered whereby extreme heat is endured; in either case the endurance is due to benumbed brain-centres. The alcoholic simply lessens the power to suffer mentally or physically; hence in degree it is an anæsthetic, and as such it also affects the moral sense and lessens the power of reason and judgment. They are habitually taken for no other reason than for the temporary relief they give to some ill of life.

It seems the very depths of total depravity when there is no bread for the hungry family, that the price of a loaf will rather be spent for a drink; but it is not so much moral depravity as depravity of brain-substance. The lethal drink is taken because without it there is more acute suffering than from the want of a loaf of bread by the entire family. In my practice an ordinarily sober father would always get drunk and stay drunk while any member of his family was sick, and for the sole reason that he could not endure the worry of apprehension. This was not so much depravity as an acute sense of the suffering and danger involved, a painful rousing of the best instincts of the soul, those instincts that raise man above the brute and make him the noblest work of the divine hand. That is not a bad man at heart who has such a sense of affection for his wife or child when they seem dangerously sick that he must have artificial aid to endurance; and if you shall detect the alcoholic odor in his breath at the funeral you may know that there is heart agony under repression.

The fact that alcoholics are anæsthetics, and not stimulants, has become known to a few of the scientists in the medical profession; but it can scarcely be said to have become known to the profession generally. That the habitual drinker partakes for any other reason than to drown his woes that will not stay drowned, and that the drowning is not stimulation, do not need argument.

The alcoholic in proportion to its strength is mental chaos and paralysis to power, and it has not the virtue to contain an atom that can be converted into a living atom. In not the least sense is it a tissue-builder, and its use by the medical profession is without the shadow of a reason, and is all the more reprehensible in cases of shock.

Let us see: shock in degree is brain paralysis; alcoholics in degree are brain paralyzers; shock is simply a state of exhaustion with rest the supreme need. All the rousement that is necessary and that can avail will be called into action by the need of oxygen. There are cases of disease in which breathing goes on hour after hour, when the soul seems to have departed and with it every life sense. The patient has become dead beyond reviving, and yet breathes hour after hour. Now can one for one moment think that an alcoholic can add to the power of the respiratory centres of the brain to respond to the calls for oxygen and so prolong life? Shock in its gravest degree is to be considered the extreme of the tired-out condition, with rest the only restorative means; and rest may be permitted with the certainty that for mere breathing purposes alcoholics are dangerous in proportion to the gravity of the shock.

In health the alcoholic only adds discomfort, because there are no complaints to soothe; hence it is the duty of every mother so to train her sons in health-habits that those first drinks will be discouraging because they bring no cheer of contrast, but rather sensations that are not suggestive of a better physical condition.

Alcoholics have a corroding effect upon the mucous membrane of the stomach, a congestive effect by which the glands are subjected to starving pressure; hence their use always disables the mere mechanics and the chemistry involved in digestion, and so prolongs disease, and this applies to all medicines that corrode. This corroding power of the alcoholics upon the walls of the stomach and its paralyzing effect upon the brain-centres, with the additional fact that there is nothing in it that adds force to any life power or that can be converted into living atoms, should make its use in the stomach of the sick a crime scarcely to be excused by ignorance.

The evolution of the drunkard is a process of culture, and involves something of a constitutional tendency as in other diseases. I conceive that there is an alcoholic temperament, or a temperament in which the inability to bear with patience the various mental and physical woes of life is marked even from childhood. Indigestion and every cause that lowers vital power only add to the importance of such a nervous system.

The first step in the evolution of the drunkard is the first untimely meal drawn from the breast of the mother. By irregular nursings and the nursings merely to stop crying the nervous system is continually overtaxed. There are the untimely meals to prevent gluttony; there are the between-meal lunches to incite nervousness, irritability, a feeling of unrest that nothing seems to satisfy.