DOCTOR TANNER ON FASTING.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume I, Issue 63, 17 November 1880, Page 4

DOCTOR TANNER ON FASTING.

Dr. Tanner recently lectured in Booth's Theatre, New York, to a small audience, on the subject of fasting and its relation to disease. He began his lecture by instancing the historial and other fasts since the time of Moses and Elijah, and then ■said that his fast of forty days was undertaken to silence those physicians who had set up the cry of u fraud" whenever they bad spoken of modern xjases of faßting, and to vindicate himself, whom they bad denounced as a pretender. In his early practice of medicine, he discovered in fasting a •cure for many diseases — for example, dyspepsia and inflammation of the stomach, and other diseases. He fasted for forty-two days in Minneapolis in 1877, but the medical fraternity denied that he. had done so. A. •case of long. fasting — that of Mottle Fancher, of Brooklyn — having been reported, Dr. Wm. A. Hammond, of New York, had declared it a fraud, and challenged any person to abstain from food for forty days, and this was l>r. Tanner's opportunity to vindicate "himself. D v. . Taarner quoted copiously from the correspondence that passed between .himself and Dr. Hammond prior to the fast, and, after scoring Dr. Hammond roundly, ■gave his hearers Dr. Marion Sims' opinion of the fast. Next the speaker said that his forty days' abstinence from food had upset the theories of the schools, and proved that the healing principle ib in the man. It was his faith in this power that carried him through the forty days. He had learned to rely upon fasting to restore the vital equilibrium ■without the use of drags. Americans, he insisted, swallowed too many nostrums — nostrums taken to cure dyspepsia, which is induced by overeating — nostrums that produce the very disease that they are said to destroy. Paying his respects to the <l regulars," among whom he found many fools, Dr. Tanner said he was thankful that he no longer wore the shackles of "the code;" for physicians, he continued, "are born, not made within college walls, and only educated fools ask for special legislation." Here the speaker hoped that there might be no legislation to fetter the practice of medicine in New York. After a, passing glance at 2?r. Prank Hamilton's averment that the ftwt had proved nothing, Dr. Tanner set forth his epitome of what had been proved — namely, that men can exist longer than fourteen days without food ; that the stomach will readily assume its functions after long abstinence from food, and that the animal in our nature can be subordinated to the mental. Dr. Tanner , quoted at length from the books, and then said that the fast will necessitate & re-study of physiology. "Let a •well-fed person," the doctor continued, *' sit down in utter inactivity, and he ■will become a mass of putrefying organism, and die of blood poisoning. Activity is necessary to ihrow off the effete material of the body. You can live on a quarter of the food you take, and you will be all the better for your temperance in eating. The extra effort to digest the surplus food you eat is a cause of indigestion. Easting is eminently the specific for curing ( dyspepsia and rheumatism, both, acute and chronic Rheumatism comes of blood poisoning. The blood becomes acid through a derangement of the digestive organs, and all food taken into the stomach intensifies the acidity of the blood. Ten days of fasting may eliminate the poison from the body." The doctor dwelt upon the value of pure air as a life sustainer, | saying that his riding in Central Park I and on Riverside Drive, when the air ' was charged with electricity, buoyed him up and aided him materially in continuing his fast until the expiration of his fortieth day. Then he epitomised the forces that sustained life as : "Pirst — The intelligent governing principle, which he styles the soul ; \ second, heat found in food, the fuel for the body ; third, electricity ; and, fourth, animal magnetism. "Life," Dr. Tanner continued, " can be maintained longer without food than without either of the other forces."