Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/558

542 and there was great danger of a fatal result from the enfeeblement of the nervous system. The faster persisted in going on to the end, after being advised to discontinue the experiment, and vomited immediately after taking the first food. Nevertheless, he presided at a banquet given in his honor, and fully recovered in two months. Cetti, whom M. Senator put on an experimental fast of ten days, and who drank all the water he wanted, lost more weight during the first than during the second five days.

In view of other facts showing less capacity to endure long fasts, we have to conclude that such persons as Tanner, Succi, and Merlatti performed their experiments under exceptionally favorable conditions. They had no severe weather to face, no concern about their fate, and knew that they had only to make a sign to have a savory repast brought to them. Quite different is the situation of persons who have been buried, for example, under landslides. Cut off from the rest of the world, they know that no help can come to them for the moment, but that to reach them tunnels must be bored and large masses of earth and stones removed. Long privations of food have often to be suffered under such conditions. Berard mentions men who were confined for fourteen days in a damp cellar. Licetus was shut up for seven days. The miners of Bois Mousil were confined for eight days after a landslide, without suffering greatly.

Other examples are afforded by shipwrecked persons. There is an interesting story of a party wandering on the ice-fields who were exposed to a terrible cold for seventeen days, in 1809, without other nourishment than water thawed from sea-ice. When found, their skin was sticking to their bones, their eyes were sunk deep in their orbits, and they had fetid breaths and earthy complexions, their skin was covered with a sooty scurf, and their tongues were black. This sooty aspect of the skin is a common symptom in great famines, such as occur in India and China.

We have many instances of individual fasts. An Italian seventy-seven years old, mentioned by MM. Monin and Maréchal, lived without food to the thirty-seventh day, only drinking occasionally a little brandy and water; then went to eating again without feeling any inconvenience. A man named Granie, condemned to execution, starved himself to death in sixty-three days. Antonio Viterbi, in 1821, allowed himself to die of hunger in order to escape the penalty of death. He had also resolved not to drink; but at one time, taking water in his mouth to refresh himself, he could not restrain himself and swallowed it. He had vertigo and nightmare, but suffered most from thirst, and died on the seventeenth day. This period, from seventeen to twenty days, represents the mean duration of life of a man in normal conditions who is starving. But Simon Goulart tells of one