Page:Macfadden's Fasting, Hydropathy and Exercise.djvu/61

Rh, intensified by liberal doses of active exercise.

Among the germ-diseases that have been relieved by fasting, the author of "The True Science of Living" also mentions malaria, eczema, gastric cancer, pneumonia and typhoid fever.

It is also a significant fact that the abstemious natives of the tropics are far less subject to the risk of blood-poison from severe wounds than the overfed children of civilization.

A germ-disease, as virulent as syphilis, and long considered too persistent for any but palliative methods of treatment (by mercury, etc.) was radically cured by the fasting cures, prescribed in the Arabian hospitals of Egypt, at the time of the French occupation. Avicena already alludes to the efficacy of that specific, which he seems to have employed with similar success against smallpox, and Dr. Robert Bartholow, a stickler for the faith in drugs, admits that "it is certainly an eminently rational expedient to relieve the organism of a virus by a continuous and gradual process of molecular destruction and a renewal of the anatomical elements. Such is the hunger-cure of syphilis, an Oriental method of treating that disease. Very satisfactory results