Page:Linda Hazzard - Fasting for the cure of disease.djvu/348

 this remarkable combination of a mature body with infantile instruments of function, it should be based upon the causes of the lack of structural growth noted. And again the conclusion is forced that, in disease drugtreated in early life, lies the solution.

CASE 10, a man of 34, whose physical history had been one of constant illness after the twentieth year, is next presented. The patient had been treated medically for indigestion, constipation, and various fevers. All his life he had been an inveterate user of strong tea, and in later years fermentation, gas, difficulty in breathing, and abdominal pain invariably succeeded the ingestion of a meal. For the relief of these symptoms medical correctives and tonics were taken but the conditions gradually grew worse. The patient finally decided upon a fast, but, because of family interference, a liquid diet was substituted and continued for thirty-five days, when death occurred. In this case pulse and temperature before the fast had been habitually below normal, and they made but little change during the period before death, the former remaining at fifty-four or thereabouts, and the latter so low that it