Page:Linda Hazzard - Fasting for the cure of disease.djvu/62

 recognize the fact that prevention of later evil lies entirely in his own hands, the greater part of physical suffering would be eradicated; but prevention compels personal denial in personal habit and enjoyment; and denial in these respects is the hardest of all virtues to inculcate and to practice.

The simplicity of the application of the fast constitutes its chief drawback. To the mind convinced on final argument of the efficacy of the method, nothing is more easy than to begin the omission of the daily ration, irrespective of the mental and physiological changes that are involved. Food stimulation, always an important factor in disease, asserts the power of habit over the body; and, even though the will of the patient has been brought to understand the futility of dependence upon artificial aids to health, as embodied in medicine and in methods akin to it, general knowledge is lacking concerning the proper means to pursue in order to overcome habit and to meet the physiological mutations that ensue when food is denied the body for the purpose of prevention or of cure.

The cultivation of a habit is a slow and insidious process, and so, in lesser degree, is its destruction. Abruptly to cease an act or a