FASTING CRAZE.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 88, 13 April 1912, Page 13

FASTING CRAZE.

• Fasting on religious grounds does not. kill many people nowadays. It claimed a victim, however, not long ago in Joseph Sheppard, a wealthy American, who starved himeelf to death in the belief that he could so spiritualiee his life as to live without eating. His eon, who isa well-known New York physician, and others who knew him well, declared at the inquest that Sheppard was not insane, and that his mind was perfectly sound upon all point* except food. For several years he had ate nothing but such vegetables and fruit ac grew in the sun. Then he cut his allowance to about 2oz of rice a da^, and finally to a sip of wine and a spoonful of honey every three days. On this last regime he existed strange ■to say, for nearly five months, and then died of exhaustion. The wealthy American, who died on two ounces of rice a day wuold have found a kindred spirit in Byron. For the poet had a morbid dread of getting fat and tried many meagre diets. While at Athens, he lived on a little rice, with vinegar and water as his drink, and in 1813 he limited himself to six biscuits a day, fasting on occasions for forty-eight hours at a time. Again, in 1816, one slice of bread for breakfast and a vegetable dinner were all he allowed himself, though he kept down his hunger by chewing mastic and tobacco. "Don Juan," it is said, was written on gin and water. Roger Crab, the hermit and astrologer, almost solved the problem of how to livo without eating. About 1641 he began to restrict himself to a vegetarian diet, avoiding even butter and cheese. From rooth he got to a vegetarian diet of broth, thickened with bran, and pudding made of bran and turnip leaves chopped together, and he finally resorted to dock leaves and grass. He drank nothing but water, and lived' for nearly forty years on three farthings a week. He died at Bethnal-green in 1680, in hie sixtieth year.