The Fasting Cure

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 43, 24 October 1907, Page 9

The Fasting Cure

The ' Dominion ' of Oqjober 17 gives interesting details—including a diary—of a successful cure wrought by twenty-five days' starvation upon a resident of Wan-g-anui. 'He was \ says the ' Dominion ', ' suffering from a general run-down, and in his weakness his nervous system had become seriously affected—so seriously that he was advised by liis medical men to cease work immediately and travel for a year '. Such a course was, however, out of the question for a very busy man. Details of the fasting cure came accidentally to the patient's knowledge and fired his imagination. For the period mentioned he subsisted on water and lemon-juice. His recovery is said to have been complete. The incident gives a fresh point to the wisdom, even from the point of view of personal hygiene, of the Church's law of fast and abstinence. There was a time when it was derided, even from many a pulpit, as ' the folly of fasting '. But the whole trend of modern n-edical opinion favors ' the simple life ' and justifies the dictum of the great surgeon Abernethy, who declared that a vast number of the diseases that afflict humanity are due to ' gormandising and stuffing', fidgeting and discontent, and the lack of restraint of impulses that need the control of faith and right reason.