Part 26

This goes on year after year until the time comes when that first drink has power to soothe many discordant voices, and the die is cast. Other drinks follow, with each to lessen the power of the dynamo and to disable the machine. At first, drink is indulged not without a sense of wrongdoing, but with that feeling of power in reserve to keep within the limits of safety.

The gradual corrosion of the stomach adding to the labors of the brain in the matter of food mass decomposition as well as digestion marks the decline of power to abstain and the degradation of every sense that makes life worth living. Now add to the corrosion of the membrane and the paralysis of the brain-centres from alcoholics the other inciting causes in the culture of disease, and you have the evolution of the drunkard.

How is he to be cured? Only through a fast that shall let that diseased stomach become new from regeneration, that will let the brain accumulate rest in reserve. For a time you will need to have him under bonds, for his will power is abolished. Put him where there will be deaf ears to the cries of morbid nature, for there is to be a conflict at first; but long before hunger will come the storm will subside; and finally, when food will be really desired, there will be a new stomach and a new brain to which an alcoholic will be no temptation.

This is no figure of speech, because there is such a continual change of life and death going on in the soft tissues of the body that in a month or more of fasting it may be assumed that much of the tissues which is left has undergone reconstruction, and both brain and stomach act as if they are new when the time comes to restore the lost pounds.

The ways of the kitchen and dining-room are the ways of disease and death, ways whose ends are prisons, asylums, scaffolds, to a far larger extent than is dreamed of by the fathers and mothers of the land. A new crusade against intemperance, the intemperance of the dining-room, is the only one that will ever settle this so-called liquor question. The rum-seller will only pull down his sign through the starvation of his business.

With brains and stomachs kept in the highest order, the alcoholic has only the least power of the beguiling kind; it is rather a dose whose effects do not invite repetition. But for all who have the drink disease seemingly beyond hope a fast of a month, or two months if necessary, will cure any stomach or brain, no matter how pickled they are with alcoholic soaking, and with only the least disturbance in the habit breaking; even within a week the hardest of the fighting should be over when the fast is made absolute.

XV.

I have now to consider briefly a most distressing disease, one that perhaps was never cured by the power of doses, and that most happily illustrates the structural changes in the cure of disease.

Asthmatic distress is caused by congestion of the terminals of the bronchial tubes, by which entrance of air into the cells is made difficult, even in some cases to the point of suffocation. This condition as a disease may be called bronchial catarrh, as in most cases there is such a condition of the larger tubes as to cause the habitual raising of a discharge. As to the disease itself, you have only to recall what has been said about nasal catarrh in order to understand its origin and development. It would be as trivial a disease were it not for the fact that those smaller and ultimate tubes, because of flabby walls and weak vessels, become congested, with resulting narrowing of the air-ways of life.

For this most distressing disease local treatments are as futile and void of intelligence as the physiology and anatomy involved in cause and cure of other local diseases. Is it not a great thing that those too narrow ways of life may be reached through a fast which shall so charge the brain with power that the flabby walls will be condensed; that most cases of asthma may be cured, with marked relief for every case? This is as certain as a result, as that rest restores strength. With the toning of the brain through rest, a catarrh of the bronchial tubes is certainly curable in most cases. With a large opportunity to know I am able to say this with intense conviction.

Only a few months ago, just before the break of day, a freight train took a side track; in a few moments, with nearly a mile-a-minute speed, a limited passenger train took the same track, and in the time of a second five men were hurled into eternity. Why? How? The conductor and his brakeman were in such heavy sleep when the switch was opened that they were not awakened to close it.

Why? How? There was the torpor of indigestion holding the tired brains of those two men in its fatal grasp; their stomachs were full of food when they were already tired out by their long trip that was nearly at its close, and for them those untimely meals were the last.

Of all men who ought to work with empty stomachs for the sake of the best possible reach of the memory it is the railroad engineer and conductor; so also every man who is in any way responsible for the safety of the trains. If we had the history of all the derailments, collisions, of cars with human freight converted into funeral pyres, a frightful percentage of them could be traced to where "some one had blundered" because of the torpor from handling meals when the brain was compelled to higher services. Digestive, indigestive torpor is also torpor of the sense of responsibility.

In the city where I live is the point between two divisions of the Erie Railroad, each somewhat more than a hundred miles long. Before I began the agitation of the No-breakfast Plan all trainmen felt that filling their stomachs was the last duty before entering upon their taxing trips, and tired wives would have to get up at all times of the night to prepare general meals. In this city a mighty revolution for the good of wives, for the good of men themselves, and for the safety of the trains and the hapless passengers has been going on for some years.

In former times when these men came home from their rounds generally tired out, and with a feeling that in proportion to the sense of exhaustion was the need to eat, general meals had to be prepared at any time of night. All this is changed in a large measure. Trainmen have been finding out that the less food in their stomachs they take into bed with them and on to their trains, the better it is for them in every way.

More and more they are getting into the way of having a general meal when they can eat it with leisure and leisurely digest it; and I predict that a time will come when all who are in any way responsible for the running of trains will have to know how to take care of their stomachs, in order that they shall attain and maintain the highest efficiency for services where human lives so much depend on the best there is in memory, reason, and judgment. This will be a part of their preparatory education.

The "block system" has wonderfully added to the safety of the trains, but there should be a block system added to the stomachs of the dispatchers and all whose duties are so grave as the handling of human freight. There is no division so long that it cannot be doubled with less fatigue and better mental condition if the stomach be not on duty at the same time. In this I speak with the authority that comes from the study of the experiences of trainmen during many years: with one accord they speak of their trips as taken with clearer heads and stronger muscles than when large meals were thought a necessity while on duty.

With an empty stomach it takes a very long time to get into such torpor--drowsiness--as compels the after-dinner sleep. That engineer who once told me of such sleepiness as made him nod while on duty was not suffering from either lack of sleep or overwork of his body: it was simply a case of the torpor of indigestion, and this was when there was no block system to lessen the danger of such services.

There is a great deal of imperfection in what man does for man that comes from the indifference arising from the torpor of untimely food, and far more than there is any conception in what man does against man from the destruction of power in this way.

There is now one of the Erie conductors who five years ago was losing at least half of his time from asthma; there is another who was equally disabled from sudden head symptoms that would immediately disable. These men have lost no trips since they began to run their stomachs with the same care as their trains. And there is an engineer whose trips to the physician and to the drug-store for many years were as frequent as those to his engine. There has since been a half dozen years of wiser care of his stomach, and his wife says that the change for the better in his disposition is beyond description. These men have rendered far more service, and who cannot see that these services have been of far higher character for the company, and that they have been infinitely better husbands, fathers, and citizens?

The following case will interest trainmen: D. S., a brakeman, reached the burden of two hundred and forty-six pounds, with resulting breathlessness and other ailings that taxed all his resources to perform his duties. He was induced to cut down his daily food as the only means for relief, and to add to his strength. It took him a long time to master the fact that his strength was not kept up by food, but the gradual loss of weight with the general improvement made this more and more evident. He finally reached a time when he was able to make his round trip of one hundred and ninety-six miles without a morsel of food the while, and with much less fatigue than when there was a midnight meal from a lunch-pail. Within a year the weight has gone down to one hundred and eighty-eight pounds. To my professional eye there is beauty in the bright eyes, in the condensed, smooth face, in the body enfolded with clothes that flap in the breeze like the sails of a ship. No accident will happen to precious human freight through his brain kept free from digestive torpor while on duty.

Ever since my book has been out I have been in more or less trouble with cases that badly needed my personal care, and not few in which death was inevitable. For instance, there is a woman in Illinois who has been ailing for years, and in spite of the No-breakfast Plan has had to take to her bed with acute aversion to food. Medical art had utterly failed before she changed her dietary methods.

Her dietary views are known, and so she is held in severe censure because the sick stomach is not compelled to a futile service; and though I am informed of an enlargement in the region of the bowels that has been perceptible and tender for years, her death will be considered suicidal from starvation.

A Warrensburg, Ill., editor began his fast by throwing up his food and continued it to the end; yet because he had talked about a fast it was supposed to be a case of suicide of the stupid kind; and though the post-mortem revealed a diseased gall-bladder, the doctors who made it did nothing to lessen the suicidal impression, and the death from "starvation" appeared under large headlines in the public prints.

When men as learned, able, and eminent as Dr. Shrady, of New York, go into print to inform the public that people may starve to death in ten days, and when such men as Prof. Wood, of the University of Pennsylvania, do not see any starvation in the wasting pounds of acute disease, the care of acute sickness as Nature would have it is a grave matter for the physician.

In five fatal cases under my care in which there was no possibility of feeding, there was such agitation over the question of starvation as would have subjected me to violence had my city been nearer the equator. In all these cases I was compelled to have a post-mortem to silence heathen raging. In one case in which a young man had died after weeks of inability to take food, even one of my medical brethren carried the conviction with him for years, and without seeking to inform himself, that there was a death from starvation. In this case there were spells of hunger in a fury, when meals would be taken, only to be soon thrown up, and he finally took to his bed to starve slowly to death. There was mind enough left to make a will, though the body had lost apparently more than half the normal weight; the post-mortem revealed a stomach seared, thickened, and not more than a third of the normal size.

The physiology of fasting in time of sickness is so entirely new to the medical world that every death that occurs with those who practise it is certain to be attributed to starving.

Early in this year (1900) a woman of seventy, in high circles, died from an obscure stomach trouble. For thirty-eight days there averaged nearly a half-dozen spells of vomiting; and yet it was generally believed that it was clearly a case of death from starvation, believed by those whose power to receive impressions is far stronger than their power to consider.