Page:Linda Hazzard - Fasting for the cure of disease.djvu/345

 from the nose occurred, indicating obstructed circulation, and, after the twenty-second day, the patient kept his bed with nose-bleed and hiccoughs intermittently present. At this stage of the treatment the latter symptom in severe form is conclusive of organic defect, and three days before death, when the hiccoughing had become continuous, the patient sank into coma and never regained consciousness. He died forty-nine days from the beginning of the fast.

From the twenty-first day quantities of black bile were vomited, which, as are hiccoughs, is a sign that intestinal obstruction exists, and this diagnosis was completely corroborated by the autopsy. Ten feet of the upper portion of the small intestine proved to have been arrested in growth in childhood, and the walls of the organ were of cartilaginous nature. In the duodenum was discovered an accumulation of hard tissue, similar to that described in CASE 2, which entirely closed the bowel. No food material could possibly have passed this point for months previous to the fast. The presence of this abnormal formation explains two facts observed in the case: the first, that the patient had been compelled to subsist for a