Page:Macfadden's Fasting, Hydropathy and Exercise.djvu/68

62 forty per cent., and exhibition fasters have survived a reduction of thirty per cent., without anything like a total collapse of vital vigor.

The first few meals after such a fast have to be served in doll-house saucers. Reckless gorging might forfeit all the advantages of a sanitary fast, and rations have to be raised from ounces to half pounds, with four-hour intervals—a precaution which Nature tries to enforce in a peculiar way of her own: After a fast of four days or more the teguments of the palate become so sensitive that mastication has to proceed with pauses.

The above quoted instances preclude the idea of a week's fast involving any life-endangering consequences. It would often relieve disorders which drugs can only complicate and give the patient a new lease of life, hope and vigor.

But for ordinary purposes even a two-days' intermission of surfeits would result in sanitary benefits apt to reform all but the most inveterate gluttons. No need of aggravating the sickness of dyspeptics by mentioning the "duty of self-denial," and evoke visions of spiritual advisers helping themselves to the assets of world-renouncing idiots; the mere change from physical