Page:Linda Hazzard - Fasting for the cure of disease.djvu/265

 faith in the method unshakable. When death occurs, it is inevitable; it cannot come except when it is not possible for the vital organs to function longer. The life of the patient is extended through abstinence from food, since organic effort is thereby greatly reduced.

In the event that grave organic defects exist in a patient, signs, more or less determinant, are expressed in both the time of preparation and in the early days of the fast. Serious symptoms do not usually appear before the third week of abstinence. And then these demonstrations may assume any of the forms of .weakness, even to loss of mental control. In the writer's own experience, four cases are noted in which at this period violent delirium, several days in duration, occurred. Two other patients were for longer time mildly delirious. But all, even those in whom death intervened, emergecj from the mental cloud and continued to dissolution or to recovery with perfectly clear mentality. It is in cases such as these that human helplessness is most apparent, and here the lesson is learned that man must cooperate with nature and follow her laws.

In examining a body diseased it is possi-