Fletcherism: What It Is; Or, How I Became Young at SixtyFletcher, Horace
Science
Fletcherism: What It Is; Or, How I Became Young at Sixty
Fletcher, Horace
Mastication; Nutrition
The lower bowel is not the reservoir it formerly was. So hæmorrhoids
cease from troubling and constipation cannot exist. For this same
reason the body, at the beginning of the practice, commences to
approximate to its normal weight, increasing or decreasing as the
individual's environment demands.
A few more words only need be said. It has been easy to state the
results of experiments and observations: but the acquiring of this
new reflex, while pursuing daily occupations, is not easy, and needs
more than a little patience and much serious thought. The habits of
a lifetime cannot be changed in a few days or weeks. The shortest
time in which the reflex has been re-established is four weeks, and
this only by avoiding conversation at meal-time and concentrating the
attention on keeping the food in the mouth until complete alkaline
reduction has taken place and sapidity has disappeared.
In closing I wish to maintain as a fact, gentlemen, of the truth of
which you will only be convinced by actual experience, that by the
restoration of this reflex and in complete dependence on its use,
there lies true health, the establishment of a condition of stable
nutrition and the possible abrogation of two great predisposing factors
of disease, mal-assimilation and mal-nutrition. Unless there be among
you, as in the "Cities of the Plain," a parlous minority who possess
this reflex and take your food as you ought, none of you are in the
enjoyment of such health as you might have. A like punishment will be
meted out to you as was visited on those cities, for you will all be
consumed long before your day by the unnecessary combustion in your
bodies caused by the circulation in them of toxins, the product of
undigested and decomposing food.
The writer, bearing in mind the warning suggested by the Frenchman
whose donkey died as soon as he had reduced his food to a single wisp
of straw, finds that he is taking less and less food. While his mind is
open as to his arriving at the final diet of Luigi Cornaro, yet it is
easily conceivable that living a similar life of retirement in a placid
environment, it would be quite possible to do as he did. Hence the
title of this paper and the queries at the commencement.
The objects in publishing and distributing this paper are twofold: to
make the subject as widely known as possible, and to solicit the aid of
colleagues in investigating it more fully.
There is ready at the service of the general practitioner an important
and potential therapeutic agent in the saliva of his patients and in
the use _ad finem_ of their salivary digestions.
* * * * *
_Editor's notes._ (1) Confirmatory evidence of the correctness of
the deductions made in this paper has begun to come in from many
professional sources and notably from a famous child specialist who
avers that children would follow the natural requirements in eating
were it not for artificial food, bad example, and bad teaching.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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