LIVING WITHOUT FOOD.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19048, 19 December 1923, Page 11

LIVING WITHOUT FOOD.

NINE DAYS ON “HOPE AND WATER.” Surprise has been expressed that the men rescued from the flooded pit near Falkirk (Scotland) wore able to exist for nine days “on hope and water.” In point of tact, it was just because these men hod fresh water and did not abandon hope that they not only survived their horrible imprisonment, but were actually able to crawl down to the shaft bottom, unaided, to join their rescuers. For a healthy man a nine days’ fast is, in itself, no very dreadful ordeal (says a correspondent in the Daily Mail). There are indeed plenty of people who habitually fast at intervals for from three to seven days, simply for health’s sake. The survivors from the Medusa, wrecked in the year 1876, managed to live through 13 days on a raft, without food or water, exposed, too, for much of the time to a burning sun. Of miners, the longest entombment of which we have any record is that of the last survivor from the Courrieres mine in France, after the awful explosion of March 6, 1906. He was, in all, 26 days below ground before being rescued. But he had food for the first week of his imprisonment. Doctors are divided as to how long a man can exist without food. Professional fasters such as Dr Tanner and Succi have abstained for 40, even 50, days on end, and there is a ease reported in the Lancet of 1853 of a man of 62 who refused food for four months, and recovered. The period of fasting before death ensues varies with different individuals. Generally speaking, a healthy person can go without food until he or she has lost one-third of the bodily weight. But different people do not lose weight at the same rate. Succi, for instance, lost 341 h 3oz during a 40 days’ fast, but Jacques, the champion faster, lost only 281 b 4oz in the course of his record fast of 50 clays. Medical jurisprudence assumes (bat a fat person will live longer without food than a thin one, for, like the hibernating bear, a fasting man consumes his own fat. The muscles, too, lose much weight, even the skin and hair decrease in weight during a fast. The only part of the body which loses nothing is the heart.