Page:Macfadden's Fasting, Hydropathy and Exercise.djvu/51

Rh The "Health-school of Talerno," in its "Vademecum of Sanitary Maxims," has an apothegm to the effect that "The more you feed a sick body the sicker you make it," and Dr. Isaac Jennings, the author of "Medical Reform," expresses the same truth in an emphatic manner of his own. "Don't aggravate the troubles of a sick fellow-man," he says, "by forcing him to swallow food against the protest of his stomach.

"No one ever thinks of eating if the appetite is abolished by a trivial ailment and plainly for the reason that it would be an unpleasant experience attended by depressing results; but if the ailment is thought dangerous, why, then the physics and chemestry of digestion are utterly ignored, and food must be enforced.

"There is a very general concurrence of opinion that the aversion to food that characterizes all cases of acute disease, which is fully in proportion to the severity of the symptoms, is one of Nature's blunders that requires the intervention of art, and hence enforced feeding regardless of aversion.

"I can have no doubt that feeding during illness when no hunger exists is a disease-prolonging agency.